Growing up in a rural, newspaper/job printing business, covering the local news, and printing needs for area businesses and local farmers and ranchers, for fifty years, in my hometown in Oklahoma, four people and one dog lived a few blocks from our ramshackle building that housed antique equipment. There was one desk, several chairs, an old typewriter, a linotype, big printing press with rickety wooden steps and pulley’s with wide belts, press to ceiling, job-printing press, storage, type cabinets and shelving, one saw for trimming lead pieces, one telephone, one wash basin, one broken newspaper folder, one paper cutter, one old stove, one swamp cooler, two fans, lots of ink cans, boxes of newsprint, marble, makeup tables, a tall piece of furniture that held plain, brown, wrapping paper, string and a cutting blade and shelves, a tall counter up front for work and area to greet and work with customers, a storage/work table, various hand tools, old wooden floors with some linoleum, a homemade gadget for squishing paper to apply padding compound to make note pads, a few framed items on the walls, high ceilings and old doors, and a few trash cans, and several bare lightbulbs hanging on cords from overhead.

Now, I know that intro is made up of one of the longest sentences in history, but it’s my blog and my telling.

I am truly celebrating final edits on my first book about growing up in the afore described business and the communities that surrounded us starting with my birth year for me, and for my sister, age six.

It might be that some would dub me a late bloomer for this readiness to publish this story, several decades in the making, but one of my favorite authors wrote her famed Cat Who murder books well into her senior years.

This is just the beginning for I have a raft of other manuscripts in their final edit stages, faunching at the bit to get out of my hoardship and into the hands of readers.

This is where I must inform that my books are not interspersed with dirt even though I was birthed in ‘red dirt’ country.  Anyone seeking to read the seamy side of life, must look elsewhere. Nor will I present a ‘rose colored glasses’ look but ride the waves somewhere in between the two.

One of my Oklahoma writer/author/friends, Molly Levite Griffis told me, “Martha, you must tell your stories, because you have printer’s ink in your veins.”

My brag book about my hometown is on the cusp of publication and a tribute to the hard work and dedication of my parents in the day/night tolling/telling the news of our community and surrounding towns with the visitors, travels, weddings, births, accomplishments, anniversaries, and deaths.

We hand folded every newspaper. A job for my sister and I among others, in an old building, cold in winter, hot in summer with no screens on windows or doors. I became well acquainted with Oklahoma’s hot summers and June bugs that came early and stayed late.

Long sitting on my memories are the people who came in to sit a spell and share their stories, news, payments, or orders. Some came to put in a Card of Thanks, for the outpouring of cards, gifts, food, etc. in time of illness, celebration, or grief.

My blog logo will feature an old timer ink can, dipped into with a popsicle stick contributed from my sister and I, into that wide and short aluminum can of black ink daubed on the printing plate on the job printing press, and for the many, long, rubber rollers on our big printing press. Thus, draperink is a tribute to the past, morphing into the ink flowing from favorite pens to paper in my ever-evolving writing and of course the expensive ink cartridges in my printer then onward to publication.

My writing club of decades, my beloved writing critique group and family and friends are impetus for my success, and I am grateful.

Let me know what you think of my first blog effort and have a great day.