The View Up Here

So many months have passed since I took to this blog. Here's a sweeping update: started new job at the new parish in a new town moved into a sweet studio with a giant back yard, functional if small kitchen, attached garage, lovely neighbors/landlords finished revised draft of Black Doves; it's with the publisher now. Hoping for publication this year. finished short story "Working Man"  started writing other short stories that will be collected together in a self-published work at some point in the future Sadly, I must also report that my brother Patrick was diagnosed with stage III stomach cancer just before Christmas. I am asking the Lord to open doors for me to move there -- yes even though I just moved here. It's time to go home. I need my family, and my family needs me. I've already blown through all my PTO and I don't have the money to keep schlepping back to the South Shore on long weekends. By the way, my new profile pic is of him and m...

2018 ended with a grinding, gasping, crushing sound in my little world. I found out a couple weeks before Christmas that a registered sex offender had been living downstairs from me, and although his crime was 20 years ago and had nothing to do with children, he had somehow violated whatever parole he was on. I saw the Staties leading him to a police cruiser as I returned home from work one night. I made eye contact with him; he threw me this sad little smile. I'd known for some time that he was lost and drifting, very nervous and paranoid. Now I know why. I pray for him because he seemed gentle but lost, not evil by any stretch. But it was distressing, and since I'd just moved into the apartment in October and had experienced quite a difficult transition, even more jarring. A few days after that, I discovered some very disturbing news about someone who once meant a great deal to me. The reverberations of this are still rippling through me. My judgment of character, so...

Some of you have been checking in with me about this book, the book that I am writing... the book... that has turned several corners, backed up, run over its own head, careened into the river, onto the bank and through a field of land mines... and still keeps on going. Black Doves is in draft stage, and with some grace, blessing, and a lot of hard work, I hope we are on the road to publication sometime in 2016. So keep in touch... more to come on things as they progress. And thank you for your support.

I've been writing a lot of spiritual and religiously themed posts, so I thought I'd update some of what's going on with me personally. I've returned to working on the screenplay that was once called 'Eden.' I have to rename it because some kind of twaddle just came out with the same moniker. I'm doing some heavy Act II restructuring now, which is my least favorite thing about writing a screenplay, but it's going pretty well so far. I've also not forgotten about the project I'd started researching last year on Mary Magdalene. I'm not sure what I'm doing with that; it's still in a very nascent stage. I was also thinking of looking at other women in Yeshua's ministry and life, but we'll see how the Spirit leads me on that one. People keep asking me when Black Doves will be released, and unfortunately I have to keep saying the same thing: I don't know. It's in the pipeline at Powys and it'll come out when it'...

My first novel, Black Doves , is finished and copy edited and with the publisher, Powys Media . It's now in the pipeline behind two other Space: 1999 novels, so it'll still be a little while before it comes out, but when it's ready for public consumption, I will plaster teh internets with the link for ordering. Now that this is off my plate, I'm trying to figure out what project I will dive into next. I have a couple things that need dusting off, and something new that I'm partnering on with a brilliant woman in Quebec. More on that soon...

All of a sudden, it’s February. How did that happen, I wonder? Something about the earth rotating every 24 hours and then revolving around the sun in a 365-day cycle, and the moon revolving around the earth once every 28 to 30 days, causing the tides to bulge, occasionally there are 29 days in February but not this time, and oh yeah, now that the Super Bowl is over, we can start talking about Spring Training… Happily, there are some updates for the beginning of February: I’m into the final copy edit for Black Doves . I’m taking extra time to do this because I’m a perfectionist. ‘Nuff said. The Spring semester at I.C.L.A. is off and running to a great start. We have 114 students this semester, which is a lot, in case you’re wondering. Normally we have 85 – 95 at the top end. This is the graduating class that was over-enrolled as freshmen, so that’s why there are so many of them. But they are a good group, and my 24 work study students have so far been very helpfu...