Real life and health issues have taken a big bite out of my time and creative energies over the last few years, but I'm still out here. I try to work on one of my stories whenever I can because I don't like letting the health problems win, plus writing is one of my escapes.

Thank you to everyone who has read, reviewed, or favorited/followed my stories, I appreciate it!

The photo I'm using for my avatar was taken by me at a local fire scene in February of 2002.

Favorite quotes:

Don't ever mistake my silence for ignorance, my calmness for acceptance, or my kindness for weakness. —Anonymous

Sometimes 'the majority' only means all the fools are on the same side. —Anonymous

People may forget what you've said, but they will never forget how you made them feel. —Maya Angelou, paraphrasing Carl Buehner

A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled. I always regard the first draft as raw material. What seems to be alive in it is what belongs in the story. —Raymond Chandler, from a 1950s letter to a friend

I don't know, I'm making this up as I go. —Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981

The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness. —Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried, 1990

My dear, I don't give a damn. —Rhett Butler from Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel Gone With the Wind

But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be a man of honor–by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in. The story is this man's adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. —Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder, 1934

My way of learning is to heave a wild and unpredictable monkey-wrench into the machinery. —Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon, 1929

Nick Yanov stared at the sleeping ducks in the peaceful pond and said, "They were just policemen. Rather ordinary young guys, I thought. Maybe a little lonelier than some. Maybe they banded together when they were especially lonely. Or scared." [Yanov] looked up at the brooding darkness, at the tarnished misty moon. There were no stars. Not even the great star could pierce that black sky. Nick Yanov stood where they had put their blankets down, close enough to the water to pretend they were with nature, here in the bowels of the violent city. He felt some light mocking rain, yet longed to stay here in the solitude, while dead leaves scraped at his feet like perishing brown parchment. Then he flipped the cigarette into the pond and heard the hiss and watched it float. He was immediately sorry he did it. Yet there was other debris on the still water and in the bushes if one used the moonlight to look closely. He didn't want to look closely. He preferred to think it was lovely and clean and pastoral here by the silent lagoon and the slumbering ducks in the icy water. Where the choirboys frolicked in the duck shit. —Joseph Wambaugh, The Choirboys, 1975

Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not Time takes it all, bears it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again. I think about all of us. Walking our own Green Mile, each in our own time. —Stephen King, The Green Mile, 1996

You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. —Haruki Murakami

OTHER SITES I AM ON:

I'm on Archive of Our Own and WWOMB under Bamboozlepig. MA fics and any other fics not allowed on this site are posted there, including the MST3K story I wrote that riffed on "What You Leave Behind".

I also have some essays posted on Fictionpress under my Bamboozlepig pen-name as well.

There's a handful of my Adam-12 fics archived on the Mark VII Fanfiction Realm, also as Bamboozlepig.

My tumblr blog is called "The Crazy World of Bamboozlepig".