2nd Edition Ready/Easter Candy @Solsticepublish, @Solsticeshadows

The new edits are finally uploaded to Amazon so the second edition of “Quest for the Red Sapphire” is live and ready to download or buy in print.  It was a big effort to get there but now it’s done.  Soon I will start the edits for “Sapphire Crucible” once they come back from the editor.  For today’s blog I want to talk about Easter candy.  Growing up in a medium to large family we never had much money.  When it came to buying Easter candy that meant you received a few things and that was it.  We were ok with that even if our friends hauled in lots more.  Every year I would find my basket and the chocolate bunny waiting for me had no ears.  They hadn’t broken off in the box and fallen down.  It simply had none.  So I asked my older brother why every other bunny had ears and mine didn’t.  He told me, “You have a deaf bunny.  He’s special.”  Suddenly the bunny seemed real and I felt so badly for it.  Then I would remember that it was, after all, chocolate and was meant to be eaten.  So I would eventually get over my sorrow and eat it.  Still, it bothered me that I didn’t get that extra piece of chocolate everyone else did.  So one year on the night before Easter I went to my mother and asked, “Do you think we could leave the Easter Bunny a note and ask him to give me a normal bunny this year instead of a deaf one?  I like them and all but I’d really like a whole bunny just once.”  She was shocked and asked me to elaborate.  After I did she was furious and stormed up to my brother’s room.  After yelling I could hear through the floor, my brother came downstairs in a foul disposition and confessed that he had been getting up early for years and finding my basket.  He would eat some of the candy out of it and eat the ears off my bunny.  As punishment the next morning he had to give me his whole chocolate bunny.  I went shopping as my family’s Easter Bunny today to buy candy to fill the baskets. (I never use the fake grass.  It ends up everywhere.)  Maybe I overcompensate because we had little in our baskets but for 6 of us it cost $100.  Maybe it’s just me but that seems like a lot for candy.  Prices have skyrocketed.  The bags are getting smaller as well.  Even the bunnies are shrinking.  I must not be the only person overbuying because I’ll go in the store the day before the holiday and nearly everything is sold out.  It makes me sick to think of spending that much on candy.  Then every year there is someone in the family unhappy with the choices in their basket.  Maybe they wanted caramel or not Snickers or bigger rabbits.  It’s always something.  Then I say that next year they’ll get nothing.  We all know that’s not true.  I like to see that excited look on their faces.  It’s worth a little nitpicking.