Look at that sunshine! What a great day for getting outside. I hear yardwork calling my name, but am I ever happy that I’m able to accomplish that! Weeds…you have no stranglehold on my plants! Leaves and sticks…you can’t defeat my lawn! Winter’s mayhem…your powers are useless here! C’mon everyone! Start Your Engines!

FRIDAY! It’s finally FRIDAY!

You’ve walked through fire this week – so much fire you might be crispy around the edges. Just remember this: fire destroys, but fire purefies. Everything that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right? So let that purefied light shine right on through you today. You got this!

Start Your Engines!

It was a good night…the weather held off, and as you can see, I’m surrounded by friends, old and new.

All Seven Secrets were not revealed tonight, but a few more people are in on it now.

Thanks to Denise Phillips for hosting the event, and a million thanks to all who came out!

2 a.m.

The latest review of Seven Secrets by professional readers says this…

• The prose is good and the relationships feel authentic… good character drama loosely plotted, focusing on various vignettes from the characters’ lives…
• A subtle, sweeping exploration of friendships, secrets, and grief…

Even when an agent rejects your book or when you lose a writing contest, it’s nice to get positive feedback. Wonder if they were just being nice??

I tell you what…you decide for yourself. Is it worth reading? Is it worth spending your valuable time on? I hope you’ll be able to answer “yes” to those questions.

Don’t forget – I’m doing a small reading and book signing at Gathering Volumes on Thursday, March 14, 2019. I’ll start reading pretty promptly at 7 p.m. Hope to see you there.

As you can see, I’ll be doing a book signing on March 14, 2019 @ 7 p.m.  The event is being held at Gathering Volumes, located at 196 East South Boundary in Perrysburg, Ohio. Gathering Volumes is the only independent bookstore in Perrysburg.  The owner, Denise Phillips, supports local authors, whether they write fiction, poetry, or creative non-fiction. She has a whole section in the store devoted to local authors, one of the only folks in town to create such a space. She also supports the local writing community by offering them the opportunity to do readings and book signings, so here we go…

I’ll be doing a short reading from Seven Secrets and trying to answer any questions you may wish to ask. In addition to copies of Seven Secrets available for purchase, we’ll also have copies of An Extraordinary Year and Ragged Road available in case you missed them the first time around.

Thanks for the ongoing support so many of you have given me. Your kind words encourage me, and to let you know, I’m working on my fourth book right now, as well as cleaning up some short stories and poems. Inspiration hits at the oddest times and in the oddest ways, so as long as the ideas keep coming, I’ll stay close to a keyboard.

Hope to see you on the 14th!

If you’re a smoker, you might not want to read this because I’m about to go on a rant…most everyone has heard of COPD and knows it’s a crummy disease, but not everyone knows the end game. I’m going to tell you what I’ve seen.
Do you remember when doctors and nurses used to smoke in hospitals? Or in the physician’s office? I remember. I’m old enough to remember how no one thought a thing of it. Even after the point that we knew what tobacco use meant for our futures, we carried on the habit, so addicted that it made us selfish…selfish enough to expose our very patients to the stuff. Incredible. It embarrasses the heck out of me now, if you want the truth. I chose to be in a profession that helped others, then smoked in lounges and hospital cafeterias with little thought to what I was doing to other people around me. I wasn’t worried about myself…I figured we all had to ‘die of something.’ May as well be related to my seemingly undefeatable habit.
I finally quit when I had kids, and even then, it took me a few years. Every winter I would close up the house and expose my children to carbon monoxide and God only knows what else. I don’t even want to think about it. I’m thankful every single day that I was finally able to beat it. I didn’t know it would still carry ramifications for me years later but trust me when I tell you that my particular issues are easy to take care of and not what I’m here to talk about today.
I want to talk about lung disease…COPD specifically. An absolute killer, folks, and in the most heinous and miserable way. If you are a smoker and have chosen to follow along with this post, please be aware I am going to be brutal now, because I’m mad about COPD.
First, I’m not a physician, but I know a little about this hellish disease, so here goes: COPD is an umbrella term for several progressive lung diseases that include emphysema, chronic bronchitis, and non-reversible asthma. Its most common symptom is increasing breathlessness. COPD is a progressive and incurable disease. Get that? INCURABLE.
COPD means the elasticity of your lungs will diminish over time. In other words, your soft, pink lungs, so beautifully puffy and full of air will become like two black cement blocks. What’s more, your diaphragm starts to flatten out and your intercostal muscles become weaker, meaning you can’t cough up the thick, tenacious secretions that are filling your airways. When that happens, bacteria begins to hide in there, so it’s easy to get pneumonia, which may kill you a little more quickly than the COPD will. If you’re lucky. You know – sepsis and all. Oh yeah, friends…COPD takes its good old time…slowly strangling and suffocating you. At the end, the best you can do is call for hospice care and let them help control your symptoms – the overwhelming feeling of being drowned and choked – with medications that we have available to help you.
All those advertisements we used to see were bullshit, if I may be so blunt. The guys who put out those ads didn’t care if you lived or died…they only wanted your money, and to get it, they had to get you addicted. You had to become a slave to their product. They knew what they were doing.
Stop smoking. Stop smoking today. Call your doctor, nurse practitioner or physician’s assistant for help. Call a social worker, your minister, or a reformed smoker. Call tobacco treatment specialists – they are out there. The Tobacco Treatment Center at St. Luke’s Hospital has a lot of success in helping people quit, and they never stop trying to help…even if you’ve tried to quit twenty times…maybe the twenty-first will be successful. Call your county health department – they also offer help with tobacco use. Do whatever it takes, people, but quit smoking. Your children do not want to see you with a breathing tube down your throat or see your quality of life drop to zip because of this disease. DO WHATEVER IT TAKES, BUT STOP SMOKING.

  A poem for you that isn’t very Christmasy.

Dedicated to all my Surgery pals…

MEMBERS OF THE CLUB

Before you knew…
before your family
could hear the news…
a small group of us huddled over
an incision in your belly.
There, revealed to only us—
the yellow-white growth
that is not normal in the liver.
Insidious.
Deadly.
And we knew…
no biopsy needed.

The surgeon stopped her hands
and looked around the table,
eyes weary.
With that look,
we were all sworn to secrecy.
Members of
the Club of Confidential Information
No One Wants to Know.

The circulating nurse
let a tear slip from her eye.
She thought no one saw.
The scrub tech busied himself,
straightening the back table.
Assisting, I silently prayed that God
would waste no time in deciding
to cure you or free you.

I handed the surgeon a 3-0 chromic suture.
Taking a deep breath, she said,
“Let’s close.”

Here you go, friends of poetry…

FIRST FROST

While the birch trees drop their leaves to the ground,
littering unkempt piles of gold,
the pines make good on their promise
to remain eternally green.
Blades of grass covered in rime
bend their heads low.
The fickle maples alter their coats to orange, then red,
before making an exchange
for winter’s diamonds.