ah....How much should I reveal? I am capable of telling too much, so I will just give the tiniest ever sneak preview. It is a novel. Magical Realism. Unusual. Strong Female Leads. Quirky. Thought Provoking. And it's proving to be a challenging project to put together. Writing this book is proving to be quite the experience, and I hope that those who read it will be drawn into it and enjoy it as well.

I have many favorites. Ursula Le Guin and Vikram Seth are among the top candidates for 'favorite' authors. Their books, The Mists of Avalon and Suitable Boy are absolute favorites. Although I also love the way Arundhati Roy, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende write. The God of Small Things was an amazingly written book, One Hundred Years of Solitude was captivating and The House of Spirits was outstanding. Now for the long and shorts...I found the short stories of Borges and Isaak Denisen to be my absolute favorite short stories, and for the long reads I must say that Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum blew my mind.

Life. It is such a gift. I suppose that it may take difficulties and hardships to make us appreciate what we do have, and to wake up to the fact that life is truly a blessing. They say that the dark needs to exist so that we can see the light.

Yes!!!!!!!!!! I was just a kid, in school...My first short story came out with a bang. It was called The Blue Dot...and it was about a small world, 'out in space' that was being 'challenged'!

I don't have a writing process. I don't multi task. I don't organize. I am chaotic and scattered in my writing process, but very focused and constant in my creative process!!!!

i don't remember the first story I read, but I remember that A Wrinkle in Time had quite an impact on me as a young reader.

It is a purely intuitive and emotional issue for me. If it triggers the 'feeling' I go with it.

It is interesting that my actual physical location never influenced my writing. My writing was actually heavily influenced by this other 'place', the place I used to live in and wander through whenever I immersed myself in books. As a kid, I was forever reading. Seriously, I was a precocious reader and devoured the books from all the shelves of our public library and the school library. I was always collecting my own books as well from a very young age. There was a "magical element" in books that seemed to reach out to me, wherever I would be, this magical element had the power to draw me right into the pages I was reading. I became consumed by what I was reading as my imagination created this virtual 'bookscape' as I read. I was able to travel around in these bookscapes like home away from home - most often it was more fun, more interesting and more amazing than my physical 'home' - in the sense that reality seemed dull by comparison. So back to the books I went. Now, as a 'ripened' adult, when I write, I realize that I am in the driver's seat now. Now, I create the virtual 'bookscapes' that will bloom and blossom, exploding out from the pages of my writing and pulling the reader in to experience that virtual bookscape, to become a part of what is going on 'within the words'.

My latest book is actually a fictional diary. Markella is the wife of a mob boss that feels this urgent need to confide to her diary. I chose this type of scenario because I wanted to explore the world of someone who is edgy, campy, brassy, sensitive and smart. She is immersed in her husband's world, the criminal world and its lifestyle - yet, she is equally immersed in society. Her attitude is unusual and 'edgy' - she feels like an outsider when confronting the establishment, and at the same time she feels stifled and victimized by the rules of 'her world' in the underground. The diary entries she writes allow for the reader to enter her thoughts and to walk a bit in her footsteps. She feels intense anxiety and panic, she has a different set of principles and moral logic than most, and all of that comes through as she pours everything out. This diary, or 'red book' of hers, as she calls it, is a place where she pours her heart out, and the red book itself creates quite a stir. By reading what she writes in her diary, the reader gets an intimate, first hand look at her world, at ethnic divides, at social divides, at the 'human' side of life in organized crime, as well as a feel for how they lived, how they operated and most importantly what they thought and felt. It is an opportunity to 'enter' their world and experience it in a very personal way.

I love the whole concept of 'indie author'. There is a sense of freedom in having the creative control in your hands without the requirements of the 'system' interfering in the process - be it in the forms of demands on content inclusion/exclusion, project completion, political 'correctness', or simply just feeding the machine the system created by manipulating what is and isn't in demand. It is great to be able to write something for which the cogs of the system do not see a need. It is great to be able to write about something else, something different - not from the menu of books being dished out to influence brainless trends and create memes of mediocrity.

Smashwords is great because they are user friendly for all sides. It is obvious that they care about presenting as well as offering the books - giving great attention to perfection by having obviously considered all the details experienced by the reader searching for books without overlooking the details experienced by the author publishing and offering their books at Smashwords. Everything is smooth and very well thought out, allowing for a pleasant and efficient experience for shoppers and for authors who choose to self publish here. They are fantastic at what they do!!!

The greatest joy of writing for me is....drumroll...creating the sights, sounds, smells and the overall feeling of the world created from and within the words of the story. It's what I call my 'virtual bookscape'. This is that special world that exists only in those pages of the book that was written and comes to life only when the book is read. As you read the book, that is the only time that magical moment takes place - where your world and the world from the lines of the story 'intersect' and you can enter this virtual bookscape and wander about the story. It is a sort of dimensional travel, or 'time' travel of sorts where the imagination and the written word work together to provide the reader with the map of a world made up of characters and events to which you may travel, and into which you may enter - and they only way to do this is by reading the book! Creating that is what gives me the greatest possible joy of writing.