About me
My writer's name is Regina, and I'm the author of Camel Tails. The best way to describe who I am is to bring you inside the attic where I spent my childhood. This attic is where I explored and learned many things. I had an Amish childhood, and the attic had many Amish-produced magazines. Because of my background, I didn't have modern technology to entertain myself, so I read a lot. Although I loved reading books from our desk in the living room, my best escape was that wonderland of an attic.
It had little doors in the upstairs bedroom, and the entrance was so small that I had to crouch down to enter. There were many boxes of books and magazines filling its space. I'd sit on the floor and read for hours on end. I would read until I forgot that life existed outside of there, my mind wrapped up in tales removed from the Amish community.
I learned about many fascinating cultures and exciting people apart from the Amish. I realized how much more there was to learn and do outside the Amish community. Eventually, it gave me the courage to leave the Amish culture and religion and experience new adventures far away from there. It was also inside this attic that I learned there was a country called Mongolia and many other countries and cultures worldwide. Mongolia was the one that got stuck in my head and deeply fascinated me.
I was motivated to write a short, one-page, fictional story from that region's viewpoint of a camel named, Tuli. That story kept growing over the years. While writing, I had no idea that dinosaurs lived in the Gobi Desert in ancient times or that explorers found fossils there. Nor did I know that they put those fossils in a museum in New York. Only my imagination and intuition drove me to write about this topic.
I desired to be true to the Mongolian region, history, culture, food, and land. So, I began to do extensive research. My fascination grew by leaps and bounds when I discovered that dinosaurs existed in the Gobi Desert long ago. This unearthing got me excited that dinosaurs were characters in my story. I researched as much as possible to get it true to the region. Ultimately, Camel Tails became a heavily plotted, fun-filled, spiel about geography, culture, and dinosaur eggs found in the Gobi Desert. It's all told from the perspective of a camel named Tuli, written within a fantasy- adventure and then driven by my wild imagination. It would be perfect for first and second graders. The home page showcases illustrations done by Alina Fylpenko and myself, with the first four her illustrations, and the last five are my illustrations.
Author M. J. Detweiler