“More people are leaving TV behind to read my books than ever before. In the last year alone I gained over two readers (three, to be exact). So I’d like to take a moment and say thanks julie, mom, dad, and kidnap victim I keep chained in the basement. 
” 
― Jarod Kintz, The Days of Yay are Here! Wake Me Up When They’re Over.

Katrina Alexander’s bland life has her wondering if she’ll ever find the true love she’s spent her life hoping for. With no current prospects, and a boring job, she’s just about given up. However, bumping into her high school sweetheart at her ten year high school reunion has her wondering if maybe she’d met him long ago.

“Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.” 
― Stephen King, On Writing

I’m writing a story about kidnapping and the moral dilemma faced by a career diplomat serving as US Ambassador to Pakistan in 2012. The story is fiction but the circumstances and characters are based upon my experience as an economic development specialist working for USAID in 2005 with access to US Embassy personnel and foreign service staff. The story was inspired by an actual and on-going kidnapping of an AID contractor in August of 2011. He was  snatched from his bed in the middle of the night by a criminal gang in the commercial capital of Lahore. The victim was sold to Al Qaeda terrorists who are attempting to exchange his release for that of an Al Qaeda leader being held in Guantanamo Bay. I lived, worked and socialized with this man, a brilliant Harvard economist, doing his part to change the world through service in the developing world. The book will be out next year, brief excerpts will be posted on this blog from time to time, look for them!

“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.” 
― Ray Bradbury

“Writing is something that you don’t know how to do. You sit down and it’s something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It’s beyond me, because you yourself don’t even know if you’re going to be able to. I’m always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I’ll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don’t go up there to write. The typewriter’s up there. If it doesn’t start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust.” 
― Charles Bukowski