Artistic Freedom & the Creative Spirit

In June of 2019, I resigned my nine-year-long membership in Romance Writers of America. Here are my reasons: A writers’ organization’s purpose is to support and inform writers regarding their industry. Romance Writers of America has been commendably diligent in this purpose for many years. The organization has had a hand in the successful careers […]

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Independence Day 2018

Living in the greatest country ever invented by the human mind, a country that was never ruled by any royal personage (someone believing the country was theirs by divine decree – hereditary or by violence), a country designed to be governed by the people and for the people through elected representatives, embodying the rights that […]

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Courage and Beauty

Kathleen Marie Wills Verrill: A Tribute Kathie, as she preferred to be called, joined our family when I was still in college. She had met and married my brother a few months before my brother introduced her to us. Born with cerebral palsy, she spent most of her childhood in the shadows. The youngest of […]

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‘Twas the Weekend Before July 4th

While writing my novel by installment, I consciously chose holiday celebrations. The one common thread about these holidays—besides the story itself—was the undeniable commercialization of every one of them as an opportunity for Big Sale Weekends, a fact I did mention in several of the 10,000 to 11,000 words short stories/novellas that make up the […]

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Featured Book: May 1

If you have not read this book, I sincerely hope you will, as it is one of the first dystopian novels to be universally recognized as prophetic and at the same time dismissed as pure fantasy, something that could never happen. A few quotations: “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide […]

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Fixing Things

In case this is news, we had a power outage in San Francisco today. The first I heard of it was a phone call to my office on the south side of Market Street. I heard the police and news helicopters most of the morning but that is not unusual in this city. Our building […]

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The Nasty Streets of San Francisco

All the wonders of traversing the financial district streets on a weekday in San Francisco. This particular encampment is outside a popular Asian restaurant, an iconic often-filmed bank building, and a fashionable health gym. It spans at least four feet of an eight foot wide sidewalk. On both ends, there are piles of rubbish, garbage, containers […]

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My American Childhood

My hometown is a village located in the southwest corner of Maine. For the first five years of my life, I spent my days wandering the woods and groves of lilac bushes around my house or with the kids down the road, an older girl and her younger brothers. During the summer before I turned six, my […]

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Disappointments Come in Small Doses

Disappointments come at every juncture of our lives. As children we face rejection as players on teams, aren’t invited to a classmate’s birthday party, fail a test or don’t get the grade we wanted on a paper. These are all learning experiences and prepare us for the inevitable rough treatment we will face in the […]

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Kindness Matters

My mother seemed always to have an answer for every state of the human condition. A turn of phrase, an adage, an idiom, a quotation that addressed a predicament in which I or my siblings found ourselves. One of these is well-known and the photo here begins as my mother would have, but goes on […]

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