College. Before college I thought writing was some sort of punishment. I was never that good at it. During my one disastrous semester at ASU, I got a tutor, assigned to me because of my failing essays in an English101 class. The tutor turned my thinking around and made me love writing. After that I wrote my way through college, and became a professional writer.

My current project is quantitative dream content analysis. It will be some years before it becomes a book, but for now it's an exciting academic research project. I have transcribed the first ten years of my dream journal and the transcript is 1,223 pages; this is made up of 1,978 daytime notations and 1,315 dreams. I'm tagging the main characters to find out if the same people appear in my dreams and waking concerns. The object is to find statistical proof of continuity between dreams and waking life. They have theories and anecdotal evidence, but statistics are the only thing to convince the world of research psychology about the relevance of dreams. At this time there is no consensus on anything having to do with dreams, and most research psychologists dismiss dreams. This will probably eventually turn into a book, but for now I'm transcribing journals and looking for trends.

I was publishing for about a decade by the time I wrote my first book, Betrayal of the Spirit. That was with a real publisher, not just real, but extremely prestigious publishing house - the University of Illinois Press. They assigned me an editor, and I learned a lot from the experience. After that I connected with a lot of other publishers and agents who helped me decide what to write about next, and one publisher helped me perfect one of my manuscripts and get it ready to go but then our funding fell through. I felt reasonably confident self-publishing my manuscripts because I had received valuable input and guidance from professionals. There were just a few things I needed to say, and I wanted my ideas out there. Just about that time, the means to self-publish on the Internet became so easy. At first I published my books on my own websites, then later I made them into e-books to be published at Amazon. A few years ago I also set them up as print-on-demand paperbacks.

Like the tutor at ASU taught me, writing is a way to express your own ideas. That's what I like the best about writing, besides the process of writing, the reward is when you tell someone a story or explain a history or teach someone something they didn't know before.

I have probably heard from ninety percent of the people who read my first book. The book came out in 1997, just as people were getting on the Internet. At first I got a couple of letters sent to the publisher, then after that - a years' long barrage of email from people who read my book. I love discussing ideas with people, so it has been a good outlet for even more writing. Because of the amazing people I've met, I archive all my email and keep track of people's contact information. That way I can easily refer back to our previous conversations and remember who I met. I also talk to lots of people with steamboat history questions, due to my website steamboats.com.

Along with my dream content analysis research, I'm also dedicating a lot of time to my artwork. Over the last ten years I've done a lot with upcycled canvases http://surrealist.org/art/upcyclecanvases.html
I buy used canvases at the Goodwill, yard sales, or people give me canvases, then I repaint them. I always leave some of the original artists' work visible, so it's a blending of what was there, with what I can make of it. This has been a lot of fun - and I plan to continue. At this time I have four or five canvases in process.

Some of my favorites are Barry Stevens, Earnest Holmes, Mark Twain, and Vernon Howard. I've also read a lot of great books from Audible lately.

I work in real estate, mostly taking care of property. I enjoy working with contractors to revitalize property. This takes up a lot of my time. When I'm not writing, doing artwork, or taking care of property, I'm doing secretarial and personal assistant work for myself. Does that make sense? I also like to spend time with friends and family. For now I have an elderly cat visiting me - she's been with me six months - so she likes it when I spend time with her.

When I was about ten years old, my best friend and I wrote a science fiction story that was set in the future. The protagonists were two women. One was an attorney and the other a writer. In real life, my friend grew up to become an attorney and I grew up to become a writer. We are still friends and sometimes reminisce about our prophetic story.

Sometimes I'll write first drafts by hand in my journal. For less complicated things I'll write the first draft on my computer. I frequently get my thoughts organized using clustering, as described in Writing the Natural Way by Gabriele Lusser Rico. It's an old book, but even older technique. I took lots of writing classes in the 1990s at UCLA Extension Writer's Program, and continued all through grad school. After that I was in a creativity group for five years. We often did art or writing exercises in class. I've also kept a journal for decades, so I get practice just writing down my thoughts and dreams. I usually go right to the computer when I wake up, and work all day until I have to go out for errands or other responsibilities. After I get a first draft, I may work on it by reading it aloud, getting the computer to read it to me, printing it out and writing on the manuscript, or having an editor read it and give feedback. Some writing comes out pretty much complete, while other things take years to complete.

I have classified ads in magazines that relate to my topics, and I also have business cards and bookmarks I give out at conferences. We have an indi bookstore in town that allows people to leave flyers and bookmarks, so I always leave a stock of bookmarks at the bookstore. I make them myself. My home office is a small printing press. Conferences are also an opportunity to sell books. I post lot of writing free at my websites, norimuster.com and surrealist.org. Most of it is academic writing, but I've also posted a few of my short stories. Visit my sites and find out more!