Happy Holidays! And a look at what’s in store for 2024.

Ah, the holidays. For those of us who live in the North Eastern United States, it’s the magical time of year that falls between the spooky joy of Halloween and the absolute suck of everything that comes after the New Year.

My family wasn’t what you would call “financially stable.” And this wasn’t any fault of my folks. They always did the best they could for my brothers and me. And Christmas was that time of year when they would go all out.

Santa’s yearly visit was always the highlight of the year in our family, as my parents loved to make Christmas as magical as they could. But I think it was the Christmas of 1989 when everything almost went off the rails.

Only a few days left to check out some great FREE short stories!

Thanksgiving is just around the corner. ‘Turkey Day’ as some of us like to call it. So what does that mean? It means we stuff our faces into a borderline coma while thanking God, the Universe, our lucky stars, or whatever means something to us for our good fortune to be able to do so.

But it means something else too. Something many people dread having to deal with. And I’m not talking about the post-meal BM from eating expired cranberry sauce, or having to decide between the light or dark meat.

I’m talking about having to deal with family.

While I’ve been telling stories in one form or another for most of my life, I didn’t automatically gravitate to writing novels. In fact, one of my first story-telling mediums was tabletop role-playing games.

Many a game master has written a campaign or module for their friends, and after running it, thought, “This would be a great novel.” They set out to write a book based on the epic journey they just went on with their friends. I did it too and I discovered there are a few pitfalls that game masters should be aware of before settling down to write that book.

One of the beautiful things about writing as an art, is that inspiration can come from many places. It can come from a conversation, the world around us, and perhaps unsurprisingly, from other works of art.

Since I started writing, I’ve noticed that my writing instinct tends to jump into action when I hear a particularly moving piece of music, or I’ll imagine writing the narration as I watch people proceed through even mundane tasks. It also kicks in when I see certain works of visual art. I want to share a couple of those pieces with you, today.

If you read my first blog post, you know that stories are my passion. My life’s blood. I enjoy crafting, writing, and telling them. And there’s no one part of the process that, to me, is any less fun than another.

I’ve come to discover, though, that I do get a certain satisfaction from seeing things come together. Enter one of my long-time hobbies; Gunpla.

When you tell people you’re an author, one of the first things people ask after getting past all the questions about your book seems to be, “So what made you want to write a book?” I figure, since this is my very first blog post I’ll go ahead and answer that.