About

Beginnings

Thinking about my life, I imagined a pretty specific path for my life early on, a quiet, enclosed kind of life. Think “small town” and uneventful, reading books and playing outside with my friends. This was joy. School was a light, a beacon. I still recall at age twelve opening a book of Latin on the first day of school after Labor Day and the autumn sunlight coming through the classroom window, and seeing the words “Via Appia est” — “This is the Appian Way.” It was exotic, and quite wonderful, and I became immersed in the ancient language.

But it wasn’t the only class that resonated. English literature was a favorite, but so was music, and astronomy. School was a place where I constantly met up with the unknown, new worlds to discover, new voices to hear. I loved it.

I felt a deep happiness in childhood that was always present. When it changed, I was for sure unprepared. A lot of surprises.

The path as an adult has taken me thousands of miles from my original destination (and back again). I have had experiences and seen places I never dreamed I would (including Roswell and Stonehenge). Sometimes it has been SO difficult — yet always, two things have stayed constant. One, the sense of absolute wonder at everything — entering the unknown and realizing how deep and powerful existence is, and is meant to be. Two, the feeling of God’s grace in my life, no matter what was — or is — going on. There is a cost to being gullible and idealistic, for the lesson there requires one develop discernment, and if that does not come naturally, well then, it does mean life can be puzzling and bewildering and can play havoc with awareness.

Writing, though, smooths that out, allows an immersion where I know what I am doing, what I am here for. It is a reason to live well.

Eventually, with a doctorate in English, I taught for some years at CUNY and loved that! I was sure I’d teach forever — aka ensuring once again the quiet plan, the path that was mine. Going to libraries had been essential to me all my life, and in academia I could do that to my heart’s content.

Ah, the Middle Times

But things changed — and fast! A divorce and a young son meant I had to make more money, a lot more. I suddenly found myself writing for IT in corporations, focusing on computers with network management systems, virtual protocols, and military surveillance software. Who knew? Ever??

All the while, though, I had begun writing fiction again, a passion I had in school, or at least I did as much writing as time allowed — mostly nights and weekends or on trains going to work. I moved twenty-one times for either jobs or out of a wanderlust. My son, our golden retriever Max, Harry when he showed up in a parrot shop, my personal book library, and all my story drafts always went with me (thousands of pages, in great need of sorting), even if the furniture didn’t, which more than once was the case.

It took a long time to finish things and get seen (read). I wrote because I had to, but that didn’t mean anyone was finding my work, or accepting it. I remember Stephen King saying he saved every rejection slip and could have papered a room with them — I felt much the same way! Every so often I would think I should give up, but would soon sense a deep emptiness. The writing was my lifeblood.

The Writing

Favorite words: journey, sojourn, encounters, stillness, the unknown

At last, my short stories began to appear and now have been published in Subtle Fiction, Halfway Down the Stairs, Bewildering Stories, Thrice Fiction, Kzine, Over My Dead Body!, T. Gene Davis’s Speculative Blog, and Aurora Wolf, MetaStellar, and Etherea, among others. My “Narrative of Samantha Fremont” appeared in Mad Scientist Journal. That is one of the precious ones. The ezine NewMyths.com published my mini-novella “Distraction,” a science fiction story inspired by the strange geometry of the torus, as was my sci-fi novel, The Visitors. I recently ventured into a new paranormal area with my fantasy story “Witch Way,” published in From the Farther Trees magazine, and another recent one titled “A Medieval Tale” about a monk who gets a dose of space travel was published in Twist In Time online.

More recent stories have been published and you can see them HERE from 2018 – 2022.

MARI, my YA fantasy novel, appeared to very good reviews, though it was conceived in the heart ages before. It was selected as a finalist in a ListenUp Audiobook competition and I got a message telling me I had almost made it. (Editors do this to encourage writers but it’s not comforting…:-)

There are other novels. Seven of them I had written over the years and when Kindle and CreateSpace showed up, I re-edited each one, setting them all up as Indie publications, both in eBook and paperback. Nine more have been created since, including a collection of short mystery stories. You can see these titles on the Books and Stories page on my website. My script “Second Chances” was a finalist in the Hollywood SCRIPTOID Screenwriter’s Feature Challenge (then the Challenge moderator quit before a final decision).

Only one of my books has ever gotten more than ten reviews, and most are around 5 — I am not a very good marketer of my own work. Yet somehow I feel in some other dimension they are known, especially MARI and Voices from the Old Earth. I feel this.

Whatever the venue, though —writing fiction or nonfiction, screenplay or novel — it is always about story, about being able to set thoughts down, to give words life. Now if I do not write every morning, I feel very out of sorts, adrift and uncertain!

The success I dream of still is taking its own jolly time (smile). A couple of decades, actually, so far. Even so, each day I feel a deep gratitude I have the gift of this work, this writing, to do, and the time and means to do it.

When not writing, I follow my passions watching film noir and 1950s science fiction B-grade (often C-grade) movies, absorbing biographies of writers like a sponge, and feeling reverence for all wildlife. I have a brilliant, very green (and talkative) eclectus parrot named Harry.

Mystery is a special passion, too, in particular but not only, cozy mystery. My short story collection STOPOVER and Other Stories for a Rainy Night has a page at the end, as all my books do, that describes the origins for whatever story I have told. For that book, I started to list the influences of all the mystery writers I love, and had to stop at eighteen, though it was by no means an exhaustive list!

After working on both coasts, in Texas, and overseas, I call (for a while, anyway) the Hudson River Valley region my home now — and it pleases me no end to live not very far from where Rod Serling grew up and Jane Roberts encountered Seth.

I like coffee, chocolate, and fairy lights…trees…reading the Transcendentalists and cozy mysteries and metaphysics…listening to Bach and Aaron Copland and Adele, and just about all music from the Renaissance…and good conversation with strangers and friends alike.

A Few More Thoughts on Writing…

Here are some answers drawn from questions I have received that might help aspiring writers imagine their own answers to these same questions.

The main point: Don’t hesitate to see everything you encounter from childhood on as significant, and keep track of it, for it is what helps you most to become the writer you are already meant to be.

When did you start writing?

At age 6, and never stopped… 🙂

What I have discovered, too, that fascinates me, is that from the very beginning, I would create whole books — write stories or nonfiction, cut out magazine pictures to go with them, create a cover, and then staple or bind the whole thing together — and lo and behold, I had made a book. I loved doing that and continued to create such “books” even in my thirties, still by hand.

Then the Internet brought Amazon and Indie publishing — which meant perforce I had to write the books and produce them — the artwork, covers, medium of display — whether eBook or print, do the formatting and editing, decide on design features, study services and methodologies, explore subjects in depth — the whole thing! I have to say, no surprise, I adore this aspect! And isn’t it wonderful that it EXACTLY matches what I was so inclined to do as a child?! How extraordinary to have a medium made real — a technological path — in which I could create something that had always been my natural inclination.

We all as writers know of something we did in childhood that set us on the trajectory of writing — it’s something we never let go of.

When and what and where did you first get published and why did you take the Indie path?

2012 in Subtle Fiction. Bless that editor. I did so much research and came to know only 1%-2% of queries writers send to traditional publishing houses get enough attention to be accepted into actual publication. That means many, many writers never get seen or known. Amazon has opened a path — a marvelous way for writers to send their books out into the world — and that is what we want — to share what we have created. Writing for ourselves is always the first cause — but we need to give something to an audience. It is a cooperative venture, always.

What I have also discovered is that genre writers — which I am, writing fantasy, science fiction, and cozy mystery — who get traditionally published have a hard time switching genres if their series or stand-alone books have been successful. Publishers want them to stick to the series that is profitable, and there is not the same room to try new things. Some genre writers have got beyond this, but they number very few. As an Indie author, I have no barriers to exploring genres I love, as often as I want to do so, and it is all open-ended, creatively. Not exactly lucrative (yet), but I am free…

What themes do you like to write about?

It always seems to come down to the ambience of place, and of belonging, or not.

What are your favorite subjects?

All of these one way or the other have shown up in my books and stories:

Mysteries, alternate reality, NDEs, spiritual, metaphysical, high fantasy, writer biographies, geology, Neolithic origins of ancient megaliths, classics, witty humor, crystal formations, genealogy, Renaissance music, Aaron Copland, paleontology, ancient music, Old English as a language, Hildegard of Bingen, Glastonbury, England, Nature, Native American shamans, healing modalities, eclectus parrots, golden retrievers…more…there’s so much that fascinates and draws me in. This 3D world of ours is just…precious.

What books and/or stories have most resonated with you as an author? Why? How do these stories and their characters find expression in your work?

SO many, all of them enchanting experiences: David Copperfield, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (all of Shakespeare), Jane Eyre, “Nightfall,” “A Game for Blondes” (John D. MacDonald’s best), Rendezvous with Rama, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Chester Geier’s “Environment,” most of the non-gory mystery writers from the last hundred years or so, “Rule of Three” by Theodore Sturgeon, Dune, the poetry of Maya Angelou and Emily Dickinson, Jane Robert’s Oversoul Seven, and scripts for extraordinary films like The Day the Earth Stood Still and It Came from Outer Space, just about everything Ray Bradbury, Jane Austen, and Agatha Christie wrote, film noir, Ronald Moore’s Battlestar Galactica…and forever Star Trek (and the movie Star Trek IV), and Stargate SG-1…

The list is always growing. What these and the rest hold in common, apart from their wonderful storytelling, is the intensity of the writer’s desire to present something authentic, no matter the risk, to explain what lies within the story and screenplay that is not only sub-text but also truth-telling. And to do world-building, to create a place and people we somehow believe in, take deep into our heart.

Such writers seem to me to accept the premise that finding the core of what it is they want to say and the words to do that make a good day, no matter what else is going on.

They write for their own meandering path of reality and substance and to grasp ephemeral and hidden awareness. That is what I seek, as well.