Short Story Life Lessons, can be found on Amazon in Saturday Evening Post Publication
Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post 2015
Novels
Three Steps of the Sun
It’s 1895 and Mary Watts, suffragette, artist, and wife of the most famous artist in England, G.F. Watts, has a problem. She’s working on her first commission, a chapel that will later be called a masterpiece of the English Art Nouveau. It is to contain all her own designs swirling throughout the inside and outside of the structure. She must project manage the villagers to help with it, a social experiment–art and democracy in action. Her husband doubts she can do it, but William Morris believes in her. They study Celtic manuscripts together and she can feel an intimacy developing. He’s much closer to her age than her aging husband, who is 33 years older than she is. Did she make a mistake in marrying him? He divorced his first wife, who married him at 16. In this age of Pre-Raphaelite mania for seeking out true love, is William Morris the partner she should have? Another woman artist, an American, has disgraced herself with an out of wed-lock affair and is quickly losing her reputation and her place in art history because of it. When she threatens Mary with blackmail, Mary must decide who her true friends are and where her loyalties lie.
Wings is the story of a unique connection between a brother and sister raised on a small island in the Azores, who make a promise to one another to follow their dreams. Frank wants to become a pilot, Lillie, a radio operator. Both have difficult obstacles to their paths. Both want to find love, family and the life they feel destined for. Lillie is devastated when her brother’s plane is lost and she becomes derailed by the tragedy. She must prove herself as she fights to get back on course and find the life she was meant to have. Years later, when her own husband’s plane goes down, she must find the message through the ether, on her radio, that will save him.
Swan Diaries explores the journey of two lovers separated by war. One is a World War II hero turned deserter, the other the wife that waits for him at home. The torture Ben has suffered in a prison camp, drives him into a daring escape into Switzerland where he hides out with the woman who saved his life. As he struggles to repay her kindness, the boundaries of his identity become blurred. In the meantime, Victoria is doing her best to survive in a changed England. She has been told Ben is dead, but continues to dream about him in the cottage that is their home on Eel Pie Island. Her Swiss psychoanalyst tries to convince her to let Ben go. While exploring her own identity, she becomes a photographer. This unusual love story follows the plight of British deserters after the second World War. Ben and Victoria must find out who they are after the world has fallen apart and what their love means. This novel was in the top 10 percent of the 11,000 entries for the Bridport Prize First Novel Competition of 2021 and was long listed for Cinnamon Press Pencil Competition in 2020.
Novella
A Cornish Odyssey is the story of a hero’s journey around the coast of Cornwall, only this hero is an unhappy photographer/art teacher from Sacramento, California, trying to escape his family, his sometimes girlfriend and his job at an arts/science high school. Grant Decker just turned 40 and is realising he has someone else’s life. He finds himself struggling in a foreign but beautiful country. It surprises him and presents new possibilities. When he reaches Zennor and learns the story of the mermaid there, he finds a perfect illustration of his own dual nature and begins a personal transformation that sets him on the path of his true life.
Other Writing:
I”m working on cento poetry using my collection of Chinese and Japanese poetry of the fourth to fourteenth century.
We Were Happy
A bird cries out.
Wild geese fly south
Where the wind blows.
Rivers flow to the sea.
The city is silent.
Something best forgotten.
Arm in arm
Singing
Betelgeuse and Antares
We were happy.
Troubled Night
Troubled night.
I should not have waited.
Now to meet only in dreams.
The current of the mountain stream.
The endless, oblivious business of the world.
To write a poem
In the night.