Hello,

I’m going to blog this one in a few paragraphs I hope and not because I don’t have enough to say (for some of you I have too much) but because I it’s about what I write, have written and is working on now.
I talk-write-about writing so you may ask, “Okay then, what have you written other than shopping lists? Since you have so much to say on the writing life.”
I do have a list of projects I’ve written believe me; I didn’t say all of them were Hemingwayesk, but they were written, then rewritten, rewritten, rewritten….I started off more than twenty years now beginning with short stories; one of them was titled, Never Eat a Dead Lobster, which was part comedy and part action/adventure story, a fun read if I say so myself. I wrote all kinds of short stories from humorous, to crime, to horror. The lobster story was even accepted for publication by a now defunct magazine I can’t remember the name of though I kept the acceptance letter for years.
I gave in to the need to jump from short stories to novels for two reasons: first my short stories were getting longer and secondly, those long short stories were getting to be mostly about crime and mystery with action tossed in. My first full length novel was called White God and I mentioned it in my first blog. It’s the story about DEA agent Jack Abrams who’s sent to the jungles of Peru to bring back his former partner Elvy Wyatt who’d been exiled there. Wyatt does a Captain Kurtz (Apocalypse Now) among Peruvian cocoa leaves growers. This novel was all action and adventure that included traitorous agents sent to kill, a terrifying jungle, crazed drug lords, chases and shoot-outs; it was so much fun to write and to read even now, though I find a thousand things that I can improve in the novel I couldn’t see as a beginning writer all those years ago. After White God I wrote a novel introducing a Boston police detective. Both novels and all the stories I’ve written for that matter, involve a lot of research which I do enjoy and it of course makes the work immediate, real, just better so no story can really do without it these days or at any time I believe.
Now, I’m writing the second novel in a mystery/crime trilogy featuring New York City detective Owen Story. The first novel is titled White God and the second is titled Beyond the End. I wrote a short story that featured Owen that appeared in the on-line magazine 3rd Degree.
Have I had any of my projects officially published so that if you by any chance wanted to could go out and buy it at Barnes and Nobles? One answer: no, you can’t. A better answer; I keep trying to get them published (never give up) and I could self-publish: the best answer; I keep writing what I love regardless of it all because I love the characters and stories I’ve created. I don’t wake up at 4:00 a.m. for nothing I do it because for an hour I can fall into that magical hole of a life that is Detective Owen Story’s world that’s full of adventure, trials, tribulations, interesting and outrageous situations, death-defying feats, mind-blowing circumstances in his world so far removed from my everyday world (thank goodness) but it's one I created, it’s the one thing I can do and I wouldn’t give it up. I feel terrifically blessed to be able to write for myself sometimes it’s all I can ask for.

If you have any thing you would like to tell me or ask, I’ll really appreciate it so please e-mail me at my new e-mail address: matwrite1@hotmail.com.

Until the next time God willing,

Lori