Ridgewood Growth

I started writing fiction when I was nine. They were baseball stories about the struggles, triumphs, and defeats of the game. During my early teens, I transitioned from writing stories about ballgames to writing stories about haunted houses and graveyards, supernatural creatures, and even aliens from other planets. I kept notebooks filled with plot ideas. Stories filled my mind constantly. When I wasn’t writing, I sketched and drew the characters running wild in my head and the places that became Ridgewood.

Alice Lake began as Myers Lake, named after Alice Myers, an old woman who lived alone in an ancient Victorian mansion at the lake. She had no living relatives and lived with several cats to keep her company. A local pastor mowed her lawn and trimmed her hedges in the summer, but no other person ever visited her. And so, rumors and stories sprang up among the kids in the neighborhood that her house was haunted and that she kept to herself because she was a witch. One of those kids was 9-year-old Owen Burkhart who lived across the street from the “witch’s house.” He had heard about missing pets ending up as stews in Old Lady Myers’s kitchen, so he was cautious not to let Max, his Toy Fox Terrier, off its leash. Every day he had to deal with the suspicion that his neighbor was evil and to trespass on her property was a serious omen that something terrible would happen to him, which is why he played in the backyard behind his house out of sight of Old Lady Myers and her evil house.

It was the last day of school in June when he hurried off the bus, excited to start summer vacation, and saw the coroner’s hearse leave the driveway at the witch’s house. Old Lady Myers had died. But the bad omen he felt about the property never left him. Later that summer, someone threw a rock and broke a window. By the time the new school year started, the lawn had grown into brambles and weeds, and the place looked spookier than ever before. And when Halloween came, every kid in the neighborhood knew the rumor that Old Lady Myers’s ghost haunted the place.

Over the next few years, Myers Lake became Alice Lake. A community overlooking the lake sprang from my imagination and became Myers Ridge. Owen’s character became Lenny Stevens, next-door neighbor of Vree Erickson, and best friend of the twins, Dave and Amy Evans. And the creepy Myers house and its deceased owner became footnotes in my collection of Ridgewood history.

When Ridgewood became part of a series of books, I recorded things about the place and its residents and kept it all in a 3-ring binder that multiplied over the years until I now have eight binders of information. I didn’t know other authors did this until a local author told me about her “series bible.” It was very similar to my collection, and I took some of her ideas to make my massive bible better.

Keeping each character the same age from book to book when I began writing my Ridgewood series has been a challenge. Times change, especially culture and technology. When I brought Ridgewood to the Internet in the 1990s, I changed my characters to fit in with the times. I did the same when I began self-publishing my books in 2013. And now, I’m updating their culture and technology again as I rewrite the series for its tenth anniversary editions.

Beyond that, they’re still the same characters I created years ago. Well … almost the same. I don’t think storytellers completely control their characters no matter how much they plan and chart their lives and personalities. And when you live with them for five decades and think you know everything about them, they still take on lives of their own and produce surprising revelations, keeping alive the joy of writing stories.

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Thanks for joining me today for this look back at the changes I made to Ridgewood.

Steve, 10/6/2024

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This post “Ridgewood Growth” copyright © 2024 Steven Leo Campbell at stevecampbellcreations.com – All rights reserved.

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