I was just getting ready to write, rubbing my hands together and warming up my fingers, when the alarm went off.  The butternut squash ravioli I'm addicted to is ready.  BRB.

Ok, now it's soaking in caramelized onion and red pepper sauce.  It's the store-bought kind, don't get excited. 

Hmm.  So, did you all start out this way?  Those of you that blog.  You BLOGGERS.  I resisted for as long as I could but, well, here I am, surrendering.  OUCH.

I've been writing for a long, long time. It's the kind of length in time that goes so far back it's hard (impossible) to see it when I turn around.  I want to say - and I did and am editing it now - that I started when I was ten years old, back around 1975-ish.  It was probably before that.  I wish I could remember specifically, and I wish I had hung on to those things, whatever those things were.  I think that at first it was poetry.  Simple little things that would make my older sister smile.  By the time I was twelve I was writing little novella's and I even wrote a Starsky and Hutch episode with my friend Lori.  Oh, and how I wish I had that, written on torn out sheets of notebook paper, scene after scene that included that red Torino and Huggy Bear.  Does Lori ever think about that?  It was my job to transpose that precious, sole yet perfect draft onto clean white sheets of luxurious onion paper, which I found so incredibly sexy and fancy at that age. I was the only 'privelged' one of my group of friends with an actual electric typewriter in the apartment.  I was never pushed academicly in my youth, but my eccentric, bohemian Cuban parents encouraged the artist in both me and my sister.  By the way, they probably wouldn't have labeled themsleves eccentric or bohemian, but for the record, my family is unique.  Maybe we all feel that way about our relatives.

"The Hunt" is my first novel.  I completed it, (if by completed one means finishing the first of 20 drafts) when I was seventeen years old.  It's a love story about the first week in the transformation process of a vampire.  She happens to fall in love with who will eventually become her first feed.  Please don't make me tell you how much better than all the Twilights put together it is.  :) 

Thirty years since and I have started and finished and edited and dreamed about and formulated and EXISTED IN so many stories with so many people and so many places, some that exist and some that don't, that sometimes it feels like I've lived 50 lives. "The Hunt". "Cowboys".  "The Tree".  "Stranger in the Miror".  "Circle of Ghosts". "The Magician." "The Ride". "Something." and "Existence".  Existence is what I am going to e-publish first.  When I write about Existence it chokes me up.  The Hunt used to do that to me.  These stories have a very big piece of me in them.  And they have my peace in them, and that's probably the part that makes me feel the same as I do when I look at my two kids.  The feeling is wonder, I think.   

I used to think that it didn't matter if I got published or not.  But, yes, it does.  I may sincerely not care about becoming a bestselling millionaire, but I do want you and everyone else on the planet to read what I've written.  I want you and everyone else on the planet to come to my world and hang out for a while and get to know these people I have given birth to.  From River Hawk and Camille de Bourney to Erin Keane and Lucy.  They are right here, as sure as I am here, and I am so very proud of them and yes, I will admit it, in love with each and every one.  So I am starting my journey, today, to self publish.  I want to chronicle it.  I have dreampt about making this all available, to you, in the same way that my inspiration, Mr. Stephen King has.  In 1980 I read The Stand, and when I saw those paragraphs in italics, the way he seems to talk to himself on the pages of his novels, oh my, oh my, I was forever hooked.  Writing probably saved my life, and one day I'll share about that.  For now, I get closer to my dream and you get closer to my planet.