About The Author Bunny Hammond
I thought my brother should be a self-published author but I ended up making myself into one instead.
It was difficult for me to write at first. I am by nature a visual person and what helped me to move the project forward was to keep coming back to textile design and other visual ways to tell the story. In the end it is a novel but ultimately it’s more than that. It’s a story. A story across many formats. And I think that people need their stories.
A giant suitcase.
Then writing this story became a way to process the things that bother a person. I had this mental image of a giant suitcase and day to day I started grabbing hold of difficult things like dysfunction and ancestral memory and shoving it all down in there. With a sense of humor of course. This was all a difficult process until I started to gain momentum and after a certain point I couldn’t stop.
The subconscious mind has a lot to say.
So the challenge with writing became to, for lack of a better term- cough up, all the curiosities it was hoarding.
Then to let it all spread out in the sunshine and start to sort through it. Look at it closely and feel through it and arrange it into cohesive groupings.
From there the task was to put it all through an imaginative free association kaleidoscope and transmute it into something full of light. I wanted something positive or something that might give one a boost.
After that, came character development and then plot. “The Heartless Ranch Is Haunted” went through 14 overhauls over about two years. And that’s the creative process behind This Is Dismal.
Bunny Hammond is a pen name because the narrative voice is a character in the story. Part of the plot.
The author lives in Nebraska with her husband and children. They are in cow calf production.
She was an avid reader growing up, with her favorites including The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart, the Sherlock Holmes stories, the Harry Potter series, The Chronicles of Narnia, and the Clive Cussler adventure novels. She also believes the Willa Cather and Cormac McCarthy she read in high school have been influential.
She graduated from Arthur County High School in 2007 and she holds a BA in Economics from the University of Nebraska at Kearney. She enjoys fashion photography and interior design and draws inspiration from how western ranching with her husband and two children can get. She loves a good laugh.
Lyrical Connection
The author appreciates a strong connection between the world of Dismal that she has created and her family’s music. She looks forward to exploring the fictional world of Dismal through music.
A composition currently in development that helped inspire the atmosphere of The Heartless Ranch Is Haunted being played on a piano in an abandoned house.
