I Ain't Said Nothin' But A Word...

I had a story once.  Bits and pieces of it have found their way into every one of my books.  Twisting and turning it until there was nothing about me that was recognizable to anyone else but me proved to be one of my greatest challenges.  But twisting and turning one story into another is what I love to do. Even the dental-challenged barista at my favorite coffee shop has a story.  Hers wasn’t what I imagined it to be, the casual grandmother having another side to her sweet persona.  Discovering that she’s a displaced cancer researcher was eye-opening.  She’s displaced due to her ex-employer’s budget cuts and with no interest in returning to her former career, she’s content pushing pastries and espresso until she gets to retirement.  We talked for hours and she had some interesting warnings about the things we might find in our water. The woman at the airport had a story too.  A single mother, she was known to work as many as three jobs at one time to get her only daughter thro

Releasing a new book always comes with its share of anxiety.  It sits right up there with sending your first born off to kindergarten, then college, then finally cutting those apron strings to let them find their own way in the world.  It can truly be a nail-biting, tooth-gnashing experience.    And it's with much excitement and a hell of a lot of anxiety that I announce the release of my second literary novel, GRAYE .    I lived this story and in 1998 made the commitment to put it down on paper no matter how challenging that proved to be.  And it proved to be quite the challenge!  The characters would come and go at their leisure, sometimes refusing to let go when I needed them to most.  Voices screaming in my head to come out when I desperately needed quiet. Then there were those moments when I needed to hear from them and the silence was deafening.  This is a story that has been a long time coming and now that the last "t" has been crossed and the last "