Authors Electric

Write what you know, they all tell us..so that's exactly what I'll do in narrating the supreme adventure of an adventuresome life: my battle with a devil I had to call my friend. With your kind permission--thanks--I propose to jump right into this. Speed forward from the Seattle injury that left me with a wounded knee no surgeon or therapist could help. Onward past the walking sticks, then canes I'd come to rely on as a, gasp, disabled senior. Ah, here we are in Tucson, Arizona, where I moved impulsively in August 2022. Cheaper rent, better weather (except for the blistering summers), a fine forever home in almost every way except--I could not see myself as a stooped geezer hobbling with his walker for a cup of morning tea. Nor could I accept not being able to travel with my unbending knee. Worst of all, however, I loathed my terror of trying one more time and the screaming pains of kneehab.  Jump cut--sorry, one last time--to the office of the one surgeon willing to consid...

As I packed for the move to Seattle this fall, I made decent progress on all but one front: a, mountain of personal papers. Imagine 3000-5000 pages--everything from old love letters to leases, poems, resumes, professional correspondence, contracts, published articles, ancient receipts...Okay, now imagine all of that thrown into a barrel with 600 rejection letters dating back 20 years--picture all of this shaken wildly, then removed in handfuls and tossed pell-mell into boxes. I faced something like that. And I suppose I could blame it on a half-dozen cross-country moves...or on a crushing divorce. But I think the truer answer may lie in the staggering number of rejections received over the course of two decades (after I'd published four novels preceded by twenty more years of rejection. Or to put that another way: twenty plus twenty years of failure with five years of success in between). I believe I numbed myself in ways I never knew. As I started to sift through the wreckag...