The Pam Project

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My cousin Pam Bonazzo had an idyllic life with a handsome, doting husband/father and two beautiful children.

That was until Pam’s infant son was diagnosed with bone cancer. Pam spent months in a children’s hospital in Boston with her son and daughter while her husband worked in another state during the week and drove to Boston for the weekends.

Shocking and sadly, in 1988, while Pam waited for him to arrive in Boston, Joe’s heart gave out, and he died at just 38 years old.

Her beloved son passed away in 2005 at 20, and Pam heartbreakingly followed in 2009 at 57. After she died, I vowed to one day do something meaningful in her honor, although I didn’t know what or how.

When Covid hit New York in March of 2020, I obsessed over dollhouses, renovating two and building one from scratch. My life was out of my control but I was in full control of the lives in the dollhouses.

Around the same time, I watched a show about the ancient Egyptians. They believed that when they died, their spiritual body continued to exist in an afterlife and that a person died not once but twice.

The first death was their final breath. And the second and final death was the last time someone uttered their name.

That’s how The Pam Project came to be.

Pam’s spirit could live on for as long as I spoke of her!

What better way to honor Pam’s memory than to build and donate dollhouses in her name?

The photos below are of “The Victoria,” my first Pam Project, and a work in progress in memory of my unforgettable cousin Pam. I already have a little girl in mind to give it to!

The house that Teri built on 11/25/21

My friends are helping to ready the house for its owner

Working on the interior design — where to put what?

The Victoria House is in the works!

(Click here for the finished Pam Project.)

“If there ever comes a day when we can’t be together, keep me in your heart. I’ll stay there forever.” ~ A.A. Milne

A Novel on a Blog

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I had all but given up on my unfinished novel, My Stolen Diaries, which I began writing in 1992.

In early 2015, my book had 168 pages and 117,653 words, and I wasn’t even close to finishing it, so I decided to put it on hold and concentrate on creating a blog instead.

In March 2015, I launched my blog, The Teri Tome.

In April 2015, I only had 328 visits to the blog, but by March 2019, The Teri Tome had over 27,000 monthly visits.

With that kind of monthly traffic, it seemed like a no-brainer to revisit My Stolen Diaries and analyze whether or not it made sense to add chapters from my book onto my blog.

In July 2019, I wrote an article about the pros and cons, and shockingly, the post has been viewed over 10,000 times to date. [You can read To Blog or Not to Blog My Novel here.]

Writing the blog post was incredibly useful in that it helped me figure out a format for excerpting from my decades-old unfinished book. And the many thousands of page views I received from my post solidified my decision to add chapters of my novel to my blog.

After much thought, I decided my novel-on-a-blog should be called a Novelog. In January 2020, I posted a Disclaimer and the first six chapters of my novel.

I was reasonably sure the chapters would bomb, so the thousands of hits the posts garnered made my heart happy.

My blog traffic immediately increased by almost 50%, primarily due to the My Stolen Diaries chapters.

Of my 32 total posts in 2020, seven of them were chapters pulled from the novel.

And shocking to me was that when I calculated the traffic numbers for my top five blog posts in 2020, four of them were from my ancient rough draft novel!

It turned out my most popular blog posts were less of a post-mortem on what Teri was writing in 2020 and more about what Teri was writing in the 90s.

The Teri Tome generated over 300,000 page views in 2020, a whopping 47% increase from 2019, primarily due to the page views for my novel My Stolen Diaries.

The thousands of people who have been reading chapter after chapter has given me new resolve to pull out my book and take a fresh look at it.

Maybe, just maybe, my languishing novel has legs.

And 2021 might even be the year I finish it. In the meantime, keep a lookout for more chapters coming soon!