: About Me

I've been a writer since I stole my first ink and nibbed pen from my father's bureau when I was 6. I loved words even thenmarveling at how they looked on the page, neatly grouped, easily manipulated, moulded and made into anything I wanted.

I found I wanted to write every day. At school I would write compositions and stories, begging my teachers to let me read them out loud. Writing became an obsession that took control of my life. I would sneak off to my room and fill notebooks with words. I would wake in the middle of the night with an idea for a story and by torchlight I would create my next epic. Like some kind of crazy addict, I couldn't exist without words and books and the people who wrote them.

In libraries, the smell of all those books made my want to jump inside them and disappear. I looked to writers like Anais Nin for some insight to my obsession. But for this addict, Anais Nin was the pusher I'd been unknowingly looking for. "Words are magical. Intellectual banquets. Orgies of ideas" said Anais Nin. I was hooked.

She told me what I wanted to hear. "If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing then don't write, because our culture has no use for it" After reading that, I was high for a week.

I tried poetry. Before long I was writing three, four times a day. Then I began mainstreaming. I set my poems and stories free and sent them out into the world. When they were accepted and published, I knew I had hooked up with a bad crowd. Other writerseditors began to nod and smile and encourage me, pushing me further into the abyss of words. I wrote a column for a newspaper and eventually had to take a job writing advertising copy for radio to support my habit. But the world of "buy one get one free" and thirty second dollar-a-holler discourses dampened my spirits and leached my creativity, sapped my energy and left my feeling disparaged. After 10 years, I had my last closing down sale and threw in the towel. Never to be repeated.

These days I wander aimlessly down dark alleys, littered with people like me. I surf the net for seedy joints like this one. I'm a pusher myself now. Sometimes I pull other addicts off the streets and take them into my creative writing workshops...encouraging them to take the same road I took and write, write, write. To let themselves go. To lose control of their inhibitions - explore their minds and unearth the wonders therein. I share words without sterilizing themdeliberately trying to infect as many people as I can. There are no twelve step programs for me, or those on this site. Because in the immortal words of one of my first suppliers, "the role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say"

My passion is ...

Living...closely followed by writing, cooking, reading, creating anything

I know too much about ...

Relationship problems

My parents always told me ...

Never trust anyone completely

My childhood ambition ...

To be a writer

My favorite memory ...

Flying business class to Thailand glimpsing how the other half lives

Why I write ...

The same reason I draw breath

What I am reading/watching/listening to ...

Stephen King's new Bachman novel, and Dean Koontz's new novel

My first job ...

Short order cook in a roadhouse at age 14

My best moment ...

I have four...the births of my 4 children

My inspiration ...

Waking up in the morning, drinking in my view of the ocean

Creative Writing > Short Stories Short stories: Finding love

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PLANTING SEEDS "Tell me about your obsessions" "I don't have any obsessions - I think it's unhealthy to be obsessive about anything" "Okay then, what are you passionate about" She tries desperately to find words to replace what she's really thinking. She sits back in her chair, crosses her arms, and fixes him with a mocking grin "Well, I guess if you mean passion as a life long thing, then I'd say my ultimate passion would be educating others in the importance of doing our bit to reduce global warming. What about you." He laughs "You can't ask me that because that was MY question. Ask me a...

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