Astrological chart courtesy of Adrian Duncan; for those of you interested in astrology, I recommend Mr. Duncan’s website.  He will give a fine interpretation of your relation to the planets in our solar system.  Thank you, Adrian. Astrological, or natal, charts are based on the precise time we come into the world.  My entry information is from my mother, still alive and lucid after 97 years on Earth. If you look closely, you’ll see that both my sun and moon are in the sign of Scorpio, making me a double Scorpio. Aries is my rising sign. Scorpio people are very strange and elusive. My mother tells me my birth was easy for her, and I never kept her awake by bawling at night. I am,… Read More

I had a fair day as a writer. I’d prefer if I could say the same about every day, but while fair days are a sign that perhaps I’m inching toward the fount of my subconscious creativity, where all of the best ideas hide, there are no guarantees I won’t lose my way and become mired in illusions. Great writing days are what writers strive for. Those hours when I find my way to the elusive zone of creativity where time and the world slip away, and there’s only the next sentence on a field of empty white, I am concentrating on creating something extraordinary: a paragraph of sentences that suddenly gels right in front of me. Then I realize this is why I need… Read More

On November 7, 2015, at 4:33 PM, I finished the first draft of my second novel, which I am tentatively calling In the Land of the Lotus Eaters. For days, I wracked my weary, overworked brain searching for the perfect sentences that would lead into the final two paragraphs I had already written. In fact, I wrote part of the story’s end shortly after I started the beginning of the novel. At the time I had no idea if the story I had in mind would run as long as it did; in now way did I start it thinking, “This will be my second novel.” I wanted the end of the story to mirror the beginning, a first paragraph of four sentences that I… Read More