This weird little item was my first coin bank. I decided not to move all my childhood treasures again, you see, but before I tossed them out, I photographed everything.
It was only years after I’d stopped using this that I realized how odd it was. A bear trying to wrestle a trashbin open? Seriously? We probably got it in Banff or somewhere in the Rockies, on one of the early drives between Alberta and Nevada. One assumes there was a general propaganda theme of “Don’t feed the bears, kiddies!” attached to it.
My childhood teddy bear was a Smokey the Bear, complete with Prevent Forest Fires badge, as it happens. It had already vanished in some earlier move, so there’s no picture. It’s tempting to claim I came out of the womb an environmentalist, but I don’t remember choosing either bear.
Now that my home office is slowly emerging from the packing paper and the Frogboxes are gone, I am working on your questions again. “Why Portal Fantasy?” might be next, though I’m also poking away at answers to “Is there a Map for Stormwrack?” and “Why did you choose Toronto over Vancouver?”
In the meantime, though, I wanted to tell everyone on the planet that Goodreads is giving away ARCs for my novel Child of a Hidden Sea
