Stories of Spirits: A collection of short stories (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781481015943)

Teresa Garcia (once Teresa Huddleston-Garcia) is a 30-something mother of two children with special needs, raising them "alone" in the small mountain town of McCloud, CA. Her son is autistic, and her daughter prone to high anxiety, and is allergic to both wheat and cow dairy, which makes for expensive food bills. Just because she is on her own though, does not mean that she is totally "alone." Many thanks are due to the McCloud Community Resource Center, to her brother and his family, and her mother, for all their help. When not drowning in university coursework for her International Relations degree (concentrating in Asian Studies), and chained to the computer, she loves to text role play with her long distance mate, write stories, hike, paint, meditate, and play games or read with her kids. She also writes quests for, and helps to maintain, the online browser-based RPG Dragon Hearts. She was raised in Bieber, another mountain community, which she visits as often as she can spare time and gas, though not nearly often enough for her wishes. Her parents always encouraged her writing and artistic talents. In 2005, she decided to pick up the dream of writing and publishing a novel once more, having shelved that (and the "Shadow Chronicles" manuscript) in her early college years due to the time constraints of motherhood at the time. In 2006 she released to the public her first novel in the "Dragon Shaman" series, "Taming the Blowing Wind," and has since published a second book in the series and a poetry book. Teresa likes to work with multicultural and coming of age issues, being of multiple racial and cultural descents herself. Currently Teresa has several manuscripts to work on, such as her "Dragon Shaman" series of novels and her current favorite serialized story, "Selkies' Skins." She also writes short stories, and is running a competition to collect dragon stories from people of all ages, entitled "The Dragons' Beads: A Treasury" which closes to submissions July 31, 2013.