Thirty-One Years Later

I started writing seriously at age 24. My first serious poem was a poem about the war between good and evil, it was in rhyming couplets. Milton was my big influence at that time. I never finished the poem, and it was over twenty pages long. My next serious poem was an allegorical story about Snow White. It was funny to me the last time I read it, which was over four years ago when I still lived in Colorado. From there I started writing ballad forms, and much shorter poems to be sure. I wrote primarily poetry for a number of years, and I got some good feedback from the editor of Poetry magazine in Great Britain. He was a student of T.S. Eliot. I was eventually published in the Orphic Lute, Soapbox, The Shyness Network, and a few newsletters whose names I don't remember. Then in the late 80's I took a correspondence course on writing children's stories. It was taught by published authors, and was very helpful. This was when I started getting the occasional written letter from editors saying that they wanted to put me on their possible author's list, or rewrite this and we'll publish it, only to find out when I sent it back that the person who wanted it had left and the publisher was no longer interested in the traditional fantasy story. In 1999 I wrote my first full length novel, and I have written seven novels since then, five of them were lost when I moved to New York three years ago, but because of the kindness of relatives I got two of these back. I submitted these books to a variety of publishers, but it was not until this year that I finally got my first book contract. I hope you will all stop by on a regular basis to hear more about my little novella The Girl, the Moon, and the Melon.