Being an author has been the most unexpected adventure of my lifetime, so day after day, I continue to let it take me where it will.

I am intuition driven. I work from my dreams and from flashes of inspiration that come to me just walking through the world. I’ll stop and render these visions on scraps of paper or whatever’s available just to capture them before they fade, and in time, some of them become stories.

I had spent most of my life drawing and painting and had become quite proficient at it. Then, on November 15, 2017, I woke from a vivid dream and started following a different muse.

I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, grab my reMarkable tablet, and frantically scratch down the story, and in the morning I'm amazed at how well the OCR properties of the tool translates what I’d written in the dark. I watch as these tales develop and grow, taking on a life of their own. Often, I find myself surprised by what I’ve written, literally thinking, "Wow, I didn't see that coming…"

I’ve been learning about writing as I go along, researching, asking questions, finding out how to express myself within this increasingly familiar medium. It’s mind-boggling to me how the stories and their characters seem to creat themselves and take on a life of their own.

My first novel, Dreaming Reverie is a science fiction tale that follows Rachel, a Channel and a dreamer, who lives in a world of imposed normalcy, where her worth is constantly in question. As her dreams become increasingly important to her, she finds that what she thought was merely ethereal, is so much more.

Venture, the sequel to Dreaming Reverie, is over halfway complete. It takes Rachel on a cross-continental move to a new job and a new life, with unexpected connections being made along the way that redefines her place in the world.

The third book in this series, Dreams Edge, is a fledgling novel. Raw and in its beginning stages, it finds Rachel struggling with her dreams and the new reality she's creating for herself in the Central Mountains.

Of the numerous other stories I’m working on, one has a well-developed plot, garnered from a powerful dream. Like much of my other work, it’s young adult science fiction. In Mountain Bird, 13-year-old Mia teams up with five of her classmates to escape from an untenable situation on her home world’s sister planet.

One tale of fiction began with something I found scribbled on a piece of paper in the middle of a bunch of other writing. I have no idea when I wrote it, or if it even came from a dream, but when I transcribed it into the computer the characters began to develop and become dear to me. It’s a sweet tale about generations of family finding value in each other through a Grandfather's storytelling.

I, like the rest of the world, am attempting to live as normal a life as one can in the middle of a pandemic. I keep my sanity by trying to add as much creativity into each day as I can.