Blue Mountain is the story of how our publishing company, Blue Mountain Arts, and electronic greeting card website, bluemountain.com, were founded and developed. In this book, I write about some of the experiences my husband Steve and I from the time we silk-screened our first posters and lived in the back of our pickup-truck camper to when our poetry greeting cards became the number-one-selling card line in America. Years later, we fought--in court--two of the largest corporations in the United States to save our companies. Because these lawsuits had such a strong impact on us, I describe them in detail. In the late 1990’s, our family was swept up in the insanity of the dot-com craze. I also chronicle our whirlwind entanglement into the fast-moving world of the Internet. Many people have told us that our story is inspiring and that they admired the way Steve and I successfully pursued our personal and professional dreams. Over and over again, we were asked to write a book about how we did it. At first we wondered what could be learned from our story. Then we realized that the knowledge we gained might help others turn their dreams into reality and bypass some of the pitfalls we experienced. If you can learn a single lesson from this book that helps you to avoid one of the hurtful mistakes Steve and I made, then this book serves a purpose. This is why, after years of living privately, we felt Blue Mountain should be written. We have managed to live our dreams--a life we designed for ourselves. I hope this book will encourage you to take a paintbrush and create your own mountain of dreams.
