I wrote my first “novels” when I was about eight or nine years old. I lived in the suburbs of New York with my father, mother, and one older brother. The “novels” I wrote in those days were about very large, happy, and eccentric families of traveling musicians. My “novels” had titles like The Happy Holidays and The Merry Melodies.

After the Beatles came to the United States in 1963, I teamed up with two girlfriends and we wrote a series of “novels” about three girls, amazingly like ourselves -- only thinner and with better hair -- who ran off to England and had hilarious adventures and totally chaste romances with the Beatles. Without realizing it, we mastered the art of the sequel and wrote three incredibly similar “novels” titled Runaways, Stowaways and Castaways.

When I was in my twenties, I wrote a very bad play and then, a few years later, two pretty bad novels. And then, in my forties, I began to write short stories.

Sometimes it takes along time to find your voice.

In 1997, Bellowing Ark Press published my first collection of short stories, At the Lost and Found…some stories about Ellie and Vin. In 2007, Bellowing Ark Press published my second collection of short stories, Times Flies … more stories about Ellie and Vin.

You can read some of my stories on this Web site, and if you like them, you can buy my books from Bellowing Ark Press (www.bellowingark.org)

I loved writing these stories. I hope you love reading them. And if you want to be a writer, too, consider this advice that my father gave me many years ago.

“Shut up, sit down, and start writing.”