Hello, dear readers.It has been a while, hasn't it? I've been away wandering, up strange and beautiful roads, exploring the notion of my own death.
When I was lonely, unhappy, or fearful as a child in North Carolina, Virginia, and later Indiana, I often dreamed of alpine meadows in bloom.
I did not consciously remember that I had ever seen such a place, but when I was four, I lived for one year in Oregon. It was a halcyon time of love and hope, contentment and peace, a brief era that was followed by years of grief, anger, and instability.
When I saw the North Cascades again fifteen years later, and recognized my dream landscape, I realized that in my subconscious mind those meadow had come to symbolize paradise.
So, I mentioned Death. In the earliest hours of Friday the 13th, 2015, I was diagnosed with lung cancer. In April of last year, two thirds of my right lung was removed. Since then, there is no sign of any recurrence of cancer, and I am hopeful that there will be none. I quit smoking myself more than twenty-five years ago; most of the damage, I believe, was done in my childhood. But a diagnosis of cancer, followed by a major surgical intervention, does lead one to thoughts of mortality.
Two Little Girls is my life's work. As I went under the anaesthetic last spring, I thought, If I die without finishing that book, I will feel really stupid!
So there have been no romance stories, no new pop fiction from me, and thus no online publishing, since my last Christmas story. There might be some new stories soon, though, because my vision of Two Little Girls is clear now, though there's still a helluva lot of work to do, and I believe I can afford the more frivolous work as a break now and then.
