Wow! Everything about the story was new to me. Where was Ceylon? What is fire walking? Why do people do it? Who had the idea to do it in the first place? What kind of magic was this? This was totally new to me and exploded my complacent world to smithereens.

My questions continued and I began to do research on these new subjects. For example, Ceylon turned out to be Sri Lanka, a large island nation about 20 miles south of India. I was intrigued that a country would find it important to change its name while keeping its heritage intact. The strange nature of their monkey stories and captured princesses expanded my young view into the exotic world. Their dancers and royalty wore pointed hats of jewels and pointed shoulder pads, pointed fingernails and pointed this that and the other thing - kind of spooky, yet alluring. I had to know more. But first, the fire walking.

I was fascinated that people from all walks of life would endanger their health with these red hot coals. For me, a paper cut is bad enough, but burning your feet?! There was much more here than a dare. Finding out why took me into the world of the paranormal and spirituality. I am still intrigued with the genre, to this day. Strange, but true.

Lady with shopping bag walking over red hot coals, with monk

I found out that some people believe if you can achieve a thing that you, at first, think is impossible, it can break the chains of fear that bind you. Meditation of various forms is suggested to get your mind into a state that it will believe anything you tell it rather than believing what it sees and nothing moer. This is what separates the human mind from the animal kingdom; a cat or dog would no more walk through a fire pit willingly than a human would cut off their own arm. The conscious mind must also take part; one must decide to do this, then the subconscious mind is contacted through meditation or suggestive thought, if you will. Then the body melds with the higher brain functions and allows the individual to avoid harm during the experience. I still wonder, after all these years, if I could do it. Investigating the paranormal can be a life's work and still just scratch the surface... so instead, being in too much pain at the time to meditate, I read up on cultures of Asia.

History is always influenced by geography. I saw how a mountain range or large desert affects not only a tribe or nations travel but their attitudes, superstitions and religions. Take the Chinese and their dragon lore. It explained the mist rising from a cravass that you wouldn't want your children to play near, so you tell them this story that grabs their imagination and voila you have a traditional myth lasting hundreds of generations. Then someone includes gemstones growing between the dragon scales and now you have my attention! So I studied geology of the region which in turn took me to gemmology. The gems of southeast Asia are plentiful and extensive. Apparently, one an take a shovel and, with eyes closed. drop it blade first into the ground and you have a gem mine! Topaz and moonstone; ruby and sapphires. I eventually became a gemmologist through the Gemmological Institute of America (GIA) in Santa Monica and did further studies with the Fellowship of Gemmological Association (FGA) Great Britain.

The real purpose of this story is to illustrate my writer's path and to illustrate how one can be bitten by the writing bug anywhere, anyhow and at any time. From this assignment on, I wrote about what I saw and thought, what I hear and read about and of course, I wrote about things I did, places I went and people I met. Now I write what the characters tell me to write; characters that I (almost) believe have found me and realize I can be a conduit for them by way of the written word, to tell their stories next to my own.

So, if you are interested in being a writer and you find yourself asking "What shall I write about?" then you need to live a bit more, read a lot more and ask 10 times more than you are right now. Don't worry - your characters will find you.

~

Earliest Reading Experiences

. . .

On the other side of the top floor was a barracks type living space. It was obvious, even to me, that this place was unbearable during the hot, muggy summers. Looking around I found some books about an inventor and was intrigued. I was already quite interested in the sciences and was eager to learn. My dad allowed me to keep a few of those books (not all, mind you - someone else may want them. Who could that someone have been besides me? I hate that crap.) Anyway, over the years I have collected more of them and loved them all. I was impressed that the stories were written before the inventions became real, much like Jules Verne and Isaac Asimov.

A few of the books that enlightened me to the printed word and its lack of limitation might surprise you. Looking back, they surprise me.

I guess I was about 6 or 7 when I received a set of American Indian books from my grandmother. I really identified with the kids in the stories and grasped white man's inhumanity toward the Indian fully, but somehow 'understood' I should not talk about it, even to ask questions. Soon I was reading every comicbook I could get my hands on. It didn't matter if it was stupid or a classic or missing a page. Actually, that did bug me a bit but then there were the ads on the inside cover for wristwatch radios and sea monkeys:)

Candide by Voltaire helped me realize that classics were not all stuffy. In L'etrange (The Stranger) by Albert Camus (I read it in French before I read it in English) I found that a flat, colourless story could be so interesting - this was the voice I was to learn about a decade later. Then there was Portnoy's Complaint by Phillip Roth were I learned what it was like to be a boy, deperately experimenting with his sexual maturation complete with a piece of raw liver in the bathroom, his father pounding away at the locked door ('What are you doing in there that is taking so long?') - causing him jump and fling the liver to the bathroom ceiling. I was shocked to read that dad was let in while the liver was slowly cooking itself to the the bare lightbulb while the mortified yooung man prayed it would remain until he was in private again. That was just plain eye-opening.

But my all time favourite was a picture book about planet Earth from the first cooling millennia and through the evolution of extinction events of the Mesozoic, Triassic and Jurassic periods. The deep sea fish were so bizarre I wanted to become a marine biologist...until I got SCUBA certified and realized I didn't have to study to get up close and personal with the creatures of the dark.

These books (and more) have deeply influenced who I am today and will be tomorrow. However, when I was a young teen I got ahold of Valley of the Dolls which I presume was about drugs. My parents found it and a hysterical evening was spent taking it from me and becoming my personal book-burners. I think that was the last character building view of the world I would ever get. From then on, everything was tainted; Should I read it? Should I believe it? Can I talk about it? Is it worth it? And I went back to histoy and science with a smattering of biographies. I would not read mainstream for another decade. Then I was into intrigue, judaica and gemmology. By then I was living in Toronto (Ontario, Canada) when a friend introduced me to a movie photos shop that also had comics and graphic novels. A new world opened for me. Not only was this an upgrade, bringing the art of line drawing to the adult level, but also a realization that it is possible and even acceptable to introduce dark material in a comic. Sandman was my first. Wow!

Even so, it would be yeard before I would try my hand at the bleak horrific scenes depicted there, in my writing. Maybe it was just needing to live more to 'get' it. Frankly, I don't like extreme horror or violece - there is plenty in the universe - and don't want to pass it on, so to speak. However, storytelling (being what it is today) needs to shock if even to introduce unexpected juxtupositions, to keep the publics attention. You can't tell a story if you don't have an audience.

Anyway, this eventually led me to manga and anime from Japan and feeding me right back into history. OK, now I 'get' it - I've come full circle - I'm ready to tell my tales. Just keep those insirations comin'!

~

"The highest reward for a person's toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it."

~ John Ruskin

. . .

“If it is your time, love will track you down like a cruise missile.”

~ Lynda Barry

. . .

“The work will wait while you show the child the rainbow but the rainbow won't wait while you do the work.”

~ Unknown

Earliest Writing Experiences

. . .

I was living in England when I received my first fountain pen. I was eight.

The school I attended was modern (in that it was co-ed) though was still attached to some old-world traditions - we used dip pens with ink wells and blotting paper. We were taught Olde English calligraphy to script our Keats and Shakespeare onto translucent parchment. To this day I prefer to write in long hand with a fountain pen filled with green ink. I am also addicted to sealing wax and truely cool signet stamps. E-mail has taken all the fun and ritual out of communication. Yes, it's faster but is that always better?

I must have been quite young when I first remember a visit to my grandparents house. My father told me his favourite room of the house was in the attic and I wanted to see it. This upper floor as divided in half. One side was my dads sometimes bedroom and the other side was a storage studio for my grandfather's drawings. Though he was an engineer, he had drawers full of huge images composed of one continuous ink line that curlycued swooping back and forth, elegantly folding on itself repeatedly until an elk or bird appeared. I was fascinated and wanted to have one. I was told no, and now they are gone forever. I hate that crap. I would have framed it, loved it, shared it... but no.

When I was eleven or twelve I had a teacher, Mrs. Vescovy, that set my brain on fire! Her classroom was overfull with items like magnets, jars of coccoons, test tubes, an electric gizmo that made your hair stand 'on end' and (my favourite) a metal earth on a crank handle you could spin and watch the earth get flat-ish. A combination lesson in centrifigal force and a possible scenario of the moon pulling out from the earth where we now have the Pacific Ocean ignited my imagination. Then she told us about ancient Egypt! I was so in awe of her I altered my penmanship to be like hers. It has persisted to this day.

~