I began writing late, 55ish. Although I had been writing technical reports and grant support documentation for decades the first short stories began trickling out in my 50s. Then Dreamland Diaries happened. It debuted in 2013 in book form in two parts as Dreamland Diaries, A Novel. I high school age youth finds a mysterious artifact buried beneath an ancient cypress. He knows that its advanced metallic form wasn't technically possible when the huge fallen tree was a seedling. Who or how could it have come to be there? The plot thickened quickly when he sought answers, endangering his family. As the dramatic ending closed, many readers wanted more. As it turns out, I had left a few hints in that first effort to continue into series land, and Orion's Light joined the first book. Anything more here would be a spoiler for that second book.

In that Part 3 addition, I purposely left unfinished business to force myself to continue the series. I would never have guessed that three other books would get written and printed before the final book in the Dreamland series, PASS/Fail came out in 2022.  Meanwhile, I wrote Room for Tomorrow, a Cli-Fi enviro-thriller that takes on the climate crisis, mega-corporations, and a hint of the horrors to come after a global catastrophe, all wrapped in a soft X love story. 

The next in line, Welcome to the Zipper Club, raised a few audience laughs when it won gold at Florida Authors and Publishers annual event in 2020. The zipper referred to in the title is the platinum ties holding my ribs together after heart surgery. Facing a planned triple bypass, I found all online references to what to expect lacking; bullet lists, paragraphs at best. While recovering in the cardiac ICU, I resolved to share the causes, the experience, and recovery to prepare others and their support groups for how to move on, change the conditions that led to the disease, and live a full life after heart surgery.

As a life-long fan of crime noir and some of its best writers, I picked up on a nugget of noir jargon, NOK, or cop-talk for next of kin in murder books. N. O. K. was born and became my first foray into the genre and promises to begin another series. In it, a reporter has been downsized from his crime beat chair at a major metropolitan newspaper and returns home after 20 years to write his first novel and reboot a life on the skids, only to find himself near the top of a suspect list in the case of a missing co-ed. As he tries to solve this mystery and clear his name with the local sheriff, his own buried past in the north Florida fishing village of Apalachicola rekindles old relationships. I can't say much more without spoiling the setup without saying that it is the first of my works to be available as an audiobook. 

Ah yes! Back to Dreamland. It did take a while, but the conclusion to that saga appeared as PASS/Fail. Humanity has met the challenge of being not alone in the universe in typical xenophobic hostility. Can it overcome its sense of superiority to understand that it is only one of thousands of other inhabited worlds? Can it hope to pass the test of membership in a galactic civilization? It took a few years for me to resolve the difficulties in writing this final chapter of the Dreamland Series, but I think it was worth waiting for my maturity as a writer. I hope you will enjoy the journey.

From time to time, I will post some short stories for you to consider as I build the library for a short story collection.