The Self-imposed Isolation and Re-emergence

 Part three of an informal series...

So, I sorta ended with the reveal that I found the novel hard to finish and that my relationship was becoming non-romantic.  That seems like the easier way to say it, because I never ended up disliking Alessia in any way, shape or form.  We just quit being romantically involved.  It was really her choice more than mine.

Timeline reference:  We are talking 2012.  By this time, I had started working for Best Buy because the income from writing  & editing was not enough.  I had retail management experience, and got a position for Best Buy running their mobile electronics sales and installation.  Lots of car radios and lots of remote starts. An awful lot of time spent stripping and twisting copper wire, which did lead to stronger fingers than I'd ever had before.  That has some benefits that are not exactly work-related.

I continued to work on the novel in my off hours.  I had the benefit of a new beta reader in an associate at the store.  Sarah probably has no idea how much it helped me that she was interested and seemed eager to read each new chapter I presented to her.  I have always performed better as a writer when I knew I had an audience waiting on me, and the best audience of all for me in that way is a female who I know in real life and is willing to give me feedback and smile when I hand her or email her a new effort.  It's one of the things lacking for me currently and I am hoping to find a new muse very soon.

I finished my  novel and turned it in to the publisher, I believe in the spring of that year.  Not too long after I had finished it, I had a meeting at work where they explained that in a re-organization under the new CEO, my management position was going to be downgraded.  Basically, they told me they wanted me to do the same work, but with a less prestigious title and for less money.  I wasn't thrilled with that to say the least, and I decided to pursue a different opportunity that had been presented to me.

The local school district had a chronic shortage of school bus drivers.  I began taking classes to obtain my commercial license and by fall i was a substitute bus driver. The hard part of that was that you had to be ready to possibly go in to work at five a.m., but weren't assured of doing so. However, the money was better than working retail.  I stayed on at Best Buy, working in the installation bay on the weekends.  It was a certain income and, since the other person working in the bay was my best friend, it was kind of perfect. Working on cars with my best buddy was something I might have gladly done for free anyway.

What wasn't perfect was that my homelife was changing. Alessia and I had quit making love, and it was soon obvious it would be better for me to move to a room downstairs, not least because she didn't want to be woken up so early on days I did drive bus, which was most of them.  Also, I wasn't ready to live a life without romance, so I began dating a woman I met at work.  The fact that I was all of a sudden often out late at night also didn't play well.  Alessia may not have wanted to make love anymore, but she still worried if I was out late and found it hard to really rest until she knew I was home.

I got a full-time position at the bus garage and not long after, I moved in with my new girlfriend.  The confluence of all these things meant that I wasn't spending much time writing.  I didn't start any new stories after turning in my novel and the ones that I had already started just kind of sat in limbo.  About all I finished in that time period was a poem about wanting to eat my new girlfriend's pussy.  She was appreciative of both the written work and the sentiment, but it was the last thing new I wrote for quite some time.  I remember the poem being titled Flying Denim as a reference to jeans that were pulled off and sent across the room, but I'm not sure where a copy of the poem itself is.  If I find it, I'll publish it at Literotica with most of my other poetry.

Driving a school bus means you get up very early, go work for a few hours, then need to take time off until it's time for the kids to return home after school.  This eats up way more than 8 hours.  Theoretically, the time in the middle of the day when you aren't working would be a good time to write, but I found that I usually needed a mid-day nap.  My most productive writing time had always been the late evening, but the early wake-up meant going to bed much earlier than I had ever done before.

These factors, plus my sexual energy being directed towards my new love, meant that I wasn't very motivated to write.  That broke my habit of putting virtual pen to virtual paper.  I can't say I was unhappy.  In truth, the next several years were very good ones; they just weren't good for my writing.

Things continued apace for several years.  I proposed on her 50th birthday in 2018, in a very romantic style, got down aon a single knee and everything, in a crowded reataurant in front of all her family and friends.  She told me later it was without a doubt one of the happiest days of her life.  Unfortunately, before we actually married in July of 2020, something had begun to change.  I've received various hints but never a straight up explanation why... first came the bombshell, which she said was influenced by her experience with menopause, that she didn't feel like sex was going to be a part of our life anymore.  a few months later she started sleeping on the couch in the other room of our bedroom suite.  Eventually, she asked me to move the bed downstairs to the living room and leave her alone in what had been our bedroom.  Concurrent with some of these changes was disturbing news about my long term health.

My doctor heard a flutter in my chest during an annual check-up.  Being a diligent man, he pursued it and in Dec. 2021 they put a camera up my arm so they could look at my heart. six weeks later I had open heart surgery, where they replaced my aortic valve and did a bypass on a vein along the outer wall of my heart.

The recovery period and the new limitations meant leaving behind the martial arts I had pursued over the last dozen years.  My heart condition disqualified me from tournament competition and made it difficult to continue my ambitious workout schedule, as well as hampering my teaching.  Alessia and i had been teaching together and we had a licensed club, but the club license was on a three year contract term and with her uncertain how long she wanted to continue and me facing the possibility that I might have to give it up unexpectedly at any time, we did not renew our contract when it came due.

In late 2023, another unexpected blow.  I had been sick for several weeks and reached a point in my recovery where I was having troubles keeping food down and had some consistent pain in my mid-section.  I honestly believed the pain was simply muscle strain because I had been coughing consistently from what the doctor called RSV.

My son was more disturbed and cautious. after a period of several daywithout keeping food down, he convinced me one evening to go to the emergency room.  They were more concerned than I was and began doing tests.  It was all looking quite mysterious until the sent me upstairs for a CT scan of my abdominal region.

I'll never forget the doctor coming in after the results had come back, looking at me quizically and saying, "I don't understand.  You should be screaming right now."

My colon was perforated and I had a massive infection in my abdominal cavity. I was scheduled for emergency surgery that very evening.  During surgery they cleaned up the infection, stitched up my lower intestine and removed a sizable amount.  I ended up with a colostomy and woke up in intensive care. I was still there a couple evening's later when the surgeon that had saved me came in and told me that during the surgery they had found a tumor, removed it and several lymph nodes around it and sent the whole mess off to be tested.  It had come back cancerous.

Everything changes when you hear the "C" word for the first time and they are talking about you.  As tests continued and I remained hospitalized we eventually settled on Stage 3 colon cancer.  They did another CT scan, discovered I had lesions on my liver and lungs as well and it got upgraded (downgraded?) to Stage 4. I learned that once I was recovered enough from my rather large incisions to go home, I would be scheduled with an oncologist at the cancer center.

In January of 2024 I began receiving chemotherapy. The first few months were pretty hard... I was consistently losing weight and I had absolutely no energy.  My balance was completely off kilter and I fell several times during those first few months from doing something no more difficult than trying to walk to the bathroom.  The move downstairs that I had so hated became a blessing in disguise, because I certainly could not have handled stairs.  My wife pretty much ignored me.  My son and my dogs were my only social life other than my chemo nurses and doctors.  I certainly could not even come close to working.

I had retirement money and money I had inherited from my father when he passed in 2019 that allowed me to keep up with my bills.  Things could certainly have been worse, although I can't honestly say they were good.

One thing that did happen positively was that I started seeing a therapist.  This was something my wife had suggested when we had the long discussion that led to me moving downstairs a few weeks before my hospitalization.  It was reinforced by the oncology team, who recommended it for every patient in my situation.  It was basically assumed that everyone with a terminal diagnosis could benefit from some help coming to terms with that and I agree completely.

The combination of an immense amount of time on my hands and the enlarged introspection did lead me towards thinking about writing again, but I didn't start at this time.  However, in December 2024, my wife called while I was at my son's apartment... I had taken to staying over with my son every other week when I had chemo appointments.  My wife and I lived on a 55-acre piece of land about 12 miles outside town.  My son lived in town, only a couple of miles from the hospital and I had set him up in a four-bedroom apartment, mostly because it was all that was available and they gave us a good rate.  My chemo schedule was that I had my major time in the chair, then was sent home with a small pump that I wore for two days with my last med. I then returned to have the pump removed after that medication had exhausted itself and I was free for 10 days until my next big infusion.  

So the routine had developed that I stayed with my son from the night before infusion until after my appointment to remove the pump.  Since I didn't have the energy to drive myself, this made it easier for everyone.

However, this time when I left, my wife apparently decided enough was enough. The phone call was to tell me not to bother coming home... that I was to now live with my son full time.  It made logistical sense, but was no less emotionally devastating because of that.  I know what some of her reasons were, and those were valid, especially the one about the cleaning challenge of having a man relying upon a colostomy who also suffered from chronic fatigue and a lack of balance.  But for the most part, I've never gotten a real explanation.  The challenges regarding cleaning were all handled by me; she was never asked to do any of that maintenance. She wasn't doing my laundry, and I was still handling my share of the bills... so it wasn't about money.  Indeed, her finances were considerably less secure without my contributions, and despite still being married officially, I certainly wasn't going to continue to pay utilities or her and her children's cell phone bills after I had been forcibly expelled from the family home.

The even greater lack of human interaction I now sunk into led to my re-examining many things.  One of these was enhanced by the fact that my son built me a new desktop computer when I moved. In the process of reinstalling things and exploring old folders, I saw my writing for the first time in many years.

This led to me taking a story I had abandoned way back in 2009 and finishing it.  Flush with victory, I went to my old stomping grounds at Literotica and uploaded my first new contribution in over a dozen years. Party Favors is a story, like so many of mine that were already on Lit, that was a combination of actual events and people in my life and fictional characters. 

I found that I greatly enjoyed picking up the old tools, and soon I was writing more. I even set a goal to complete an old ambition, which is to publish a piece in each of Lit's story categories.  I have clicked a couple more of those off my list over the last year.

That is how the retired erotica author somehow became the active one again.  I retain all the rights to my old published works, since Phaze followed Venus Press and went out of business in 2015.  None of my old market seems to exist anymore.  Amazon and their self-publishing side have gobbled all of it up.  A few of my old works are still available. Amazon still has me listed as an author and several of my works with Alessia are still available, both in ebook format and even in paperback.  Also, Alessia and I had contractd with a gentleman who was doing audio books to be published on Audible and apparently, his efforts are still available for purchase.

Success of a Sort

 So, the other night I started talking about how I got into this whole "author" thing...

And I do feel like I have the right to use "author," since I have signed contracts, sold stories for money and even had a novel published... I spent as much as I made, if you take into account all my travels and convention fees spent to promote my books, but still... I had to report taxes and I am traditionally (not vanity) published, so "author", not just "writer."

I remember a time where the distinction bewtween the two was more than a little contentious between some people in the community... although I honestly know several writers who work harder than most authors and just haven't had the lucky break here or there to sell work and qualify under that short-sighted discussion as "authors."

I had gotten as far as talking about Literotica and the fact that I won an award or two there and had received some feedback that meant a lot to me, both at the time and now.  I even won the Erotic Couplings Story of the Year in 2003, and I was nominated the next year for Sexiest Male Character in a Story.   I think I lost that one to McKenna, but she's a very good writer and there is no shame in that.  I really do feel like the honor was in the nomination.  Not least because the character in question was a pretty thinly veiled self-portrait, so having him nominated for Sexiest Male Character kinda felt like a nationwide group of women calling me sexy.  That was quite a rush.

Anyway, the next step in my journey was moving past that environment.  That happened as part of a personal journey in more than just writing.  But the writing part of it goes this way... I had a friend I had made at Lit, in the forum called The Authors Hangout, who I often discussed writing and other things with and she got published by a small electronic publisher called Phaze.  The greatest thing to me about Phaze, at first anyway, was that it had been founded by the fantasy writer Piers Anthony, of Xanth fame.  Alessia had sold them a story called Erotique, which centered around a woman who inherited a sex toy shoppe that had a museum style collection of sex toys.  The various items in question carried pyschic imprints that could carry you back to a time where you shared experiences with former owners/users of the items. The protagonist and her boyfriend discovered the hard way that the energies were more than just mental images, that they actually had physical effects (and dangers!)

Alessia was quite pleased with her invention and wanted to continue using the two main characters.  Her next story idea was that they would be having relations during an electrical storm and that somehow they would switch bodies, a la Freaky Friday, mid sex act.  For perhaps obvious reasons, she wanted to co-write this with a man to get the male point of view accurately reflected.  She chose to ask me to co-write with her.

It was understood by me from the beginning that she might try to sell this story to Phaze as well, but I didn't put much thought into that at first.  I was too interested in what I felt was a pretty unique writing project.

When Phaze wanted to buy the story, I was thrilled to say the very least.  "Switch" became my first contracted work and I was very proud and happy. The minor financial earnings were not nearly as important as the fact that I was being published!  Things actually snowballed a bit from there.  Soon we had invented another pair of lovers, who's adventures were set in Pittsburgh (Erotique was in Phialdelphia) and the novella that introduced them was sold to Venus Press.  "Artistically Inclined" eventually spawned a sequle and the two works were gathered into a single volume by Phaze after Venus Press went out of business and became our second joint work in print, Passion In Pittsburgh.  Our first work available in print was Artifactual, a gathering of four works featuring the characters and settings from Erotique. (Alessia had also had a volume of short stories and poetry published in print by Phaze.)

Thus I began a period that was to span half a decade or so where almost anything I wrote sold to someone in the industry, whether a publisher or a website.  It was during this time that Phaze actually agreed to publish two novels by me, although I never delivered the second one.  (The aptly titled 'Things Left Undone', an erotic ghost story, still has not been finished. It is my most egregious example of writer's block, which in this case consisted of me writing myself into a plot corner I still haven't been able to unravel.)

I also accepted the challenge of becoming an editor, which was a more financially rewarding experience and also led to me being the right hand man of Alessia in the production of the Coming Together anthologies, a series of works where erotica authors donated short stories to volumes centered around a theme which connected with a charitable endeavor. The first of these was themed around rain and storms and the proceeds benefitted the Red Cross fundraising efforts for Huricane Katrina.  Coming Together was more successful than any of my solo work and I am quite proud of it.

During this period of time, I also had some impactful life changes, as did Alessia.  We found ourselves both going through divorces at the same time, and it was perhaps inevitable, seeing as how we were working so closely together, that we would respond by becoming a couple.  I reponded to that upheaval by leaving my beloved San Diego to live with Alessia in the Appalachian mountains, something I had certainly never expected.  I remain a resident of West Virginia to this very day, and have come to love it as a second home.

It was the dissolution of Alessia and my romantic relationship that fueled the circumstances that resulted in me putting away my virtual quill for over a decade. I also completed my first and so far only full length novel during that time, an experience which led to me viewing writing as actual work.  Writing a novel and getting all the loose ends pulled back together and resolved after spending 80,000 words going all over the place was difficult, a great challenge that made me a better writer but wasn't nearly as fun.  Deadlines motivated me, but I never liked them.

More on that period and the reasons I have started writing again as I confess part 3. That could come as soon as tomorrow or it might be next week.... I'm not sure at the moment.

The Power of Place

  I'm a believer in the idea that we can be connected to a place even on first visit.  That happenings leave something behind and sometimes we can feel that power, if we are open to it.  Some will say that what I'm about to describe is indeed a power, but that only power is imaginiation.  I think there is something more, although I certainly grant that my personal experiences are fueled by imagination and by my knowledge that there is something extraordinary that happened at these places.

I'll start with the least dramatic, for me in the moment, of the four places I'm going to talk about.  They are also the two places where you would probably find the most other accounts of these kind of feelings, not that any of my four places aren't special to many besides me.  I'm deliberately choosing well-known and public places to talk about, not little corners where the feelings are only about what I personally experienced.  I have those too, but the shared experience with others may very well be a large part of why these four affected me so.

The first two places are ones of key historical importance, so their power is broader than just what I felt.  I am talking about Antietam and Gettysburg.  Places of great bloodshed and family tragedy for so many, places where events shaped an entire nation's forward movement in the wake of what happened there.  For me, the immediate and obvious effect to an outside observer is perhaps ironic considering what occurred here.  Because the first effect on me is quiet, and peacefulness.  Inside, I am certainly not at peace standing on these pieces of bloodstained earth.  Looking out over The Cornfield, or standing in the sunken road known as Bloody Lane, my mind is anything but quiet.  But the effect on my external projections is quiet.  A silence I consider respectful, broken only by my telling my children why these simple vistas are so horrifying and troubling to my interior.

My son has told me he swore he watched me flinch while standing behind the stone wall at Gettysburg, near the copse of trees that was the visual target for the men making the ill-fated assault that has come to be known as Pickett's Charge.  As though I were trying to avoid the ghost of a long vanished minnie ball on it's muderous path.

And the reference to ghosts is appropriate.  For even though my only visit to the battlefield outside Sharpsburg and my multiple visits to the historic fields in Pennsylvania have come on fairly quiet and temperate summer days, I have felt the chill passing of spectral memory in both locations.  I can SEE men falling in the Cornfield, I can hear the report of musket and cannon. At Gettysburg, I watched waves of men cut down by cannister as they attempted to reach the lines where boys in blue instead of gray awaited them. Brutal suicide in service of their country.  While some changes in circumstances might have altered the result of what those boys did on the third day, the great loss of life was assured from the moment the men in butternut and gray stepped out from the trees and began their long march in the open across the gentle upswell towards the ridge.

In those places my knowledge of the history certainly loads more weight  upon what I feel, and I have wondered if a visitor who was unaware of that history might not feel differently than I do, but my personal belief is that there is an atmosphere born of what happened that affects even the unaware.  No one needs to tell visitors to be respectful in those places.  It just happens.  No one needs to tell boys on vacation that this is not the place to throw the frisbee or play tag and whoop and holler.

My third location also feels the weight of history, and history that is related to those other two.  I have long been a student of the bloodiest and most internally destructive time in our nation's story, and as such I have also long been a great admirer of the man I consider our greatest President, Abraham Lincoln.  th third location I wish to mention is Ford's Theatre.

You can't go into the presidential box. You can't sit in the chair where Lincoln was sitting when he felt the sharp pain in the back of his skull just before he lost his final awareness of this world. You can stand across from it and perhaps imagine that you hear the repeat of the gunpowder through the laughter from the punch line that Booth planned to use to cover his deed. Perhaps smell the powder or see a small puff of white smoke.  But that's not the specific place in the theatre that brought me shakes and makes me wonder if ghosts are real.  There are two spots that most affected me emotionally.  One is not actually in the theatre, but across the street, the room in what was then a boarding house where Lincoln finally breathed his last the next morning and where Secretary Stanton announced, "Now he belongs to the ages...". The spot in the theatre is one where I was told John Wilkes Booth stood and waited to slip into the box to do his dastardly deed.  That spot felt so filled with potential. If he had turned away, rethinking his actions, how different our world might have been. I am one of those who feel there could hardly have been a worse person to lead us into reconstruction than Andrew Johnson.  I think the survival of Lincoln into the post war years would have had a dramatic affect on the direction of the country.  Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps the vitriol was so great that even Lincoln's leadership could not have prevented the backslide in the south and the apathy in the north about the conditions suffered by the negro race.  But I can see at least the possibility of a turbulent time that none the less keeps Jim Crow from ever existing, where there is no need for a civil rights movement in the middle twentieth century, of the institutionalized racism being confronted in it's infancy and of us growing into a better nation.

The last of my four locations is the only one where you can't nail down an occurrance and say THIS happened HERE.  It's a place that has grown into a memorial, but there are no statues or tour groups.  It's Strawberry Fields.  Not the orphanage in Liverpool, but the small section of Central Park near the apartment of John Lennon and Yoko Ono.  There is a mosaic, a path through some trees and a couple of small meadows. It's exactly the kind of place that those of us who loved John from afar think he would have enjoyed.

And it's the place on the list where I had the most visible reaction personally.  When I stood in front of the "Imagine" mosaic for the first time, I just completely lost it.  Tears streamed down my face and sobs shook my shoulders.  I was transported back to being 14 and hearing the unbelievable news that my idol was dead.  It was as though I could see him standing on the other side, smiling and inviting people to live in a more caring and rational world, just before he was stolen away from it.  

I grew up with the Beatles.  My mom's favorite was Paul and my Dad's was George.  I own both of their copies of "Meet The Beatles" to this very day.  Their music was the soundtrack of my childhood and John, specifically, was the man I grew up thinking was a great example of what a modern man could be.  Artist and visionary, with visible flaws that I felt did nothing to diminish his greatness but only added to it, because he could be so wrong and yet inspire so much good.

Later, after I became composed enough to move on, my companion and I walked out into the streets of New Yor and I stood outside the alley where he was shot and again the tears flowed, although less visibly and more silently.

A man isn't suppossed to react that way in public, not even now when we have swept away many (but not all) of the repressive ideas about what a man should be.  But I should note that no one looked askew at me that day. There were no questioning gazes, no noticing and then quickly looking away, no staring.  I believe it's because people that were there understood.  Many, if not all, of them probably idetified with what I was obviously feeling. 

I have not been back to that part of Central Park and I'm sure that my reaction the next time will not be so harshly obvious. But I have no regrets.

A Writing Renewal...

Hello once again to the wide world of writing.

I've done this before, but so much has changed.  I started writing romance and erotica just after the turn of the century.  The world was in a different place at the time and certainly my world was very different indeed.

I was in a place in life where I would have been called "successful," but I didn't feel successful.  I was in my thirties, married and with two young children. I had a good job, with a respectful title and a "place in the community."  I had graduated college.  I was a little league coach.  I wore a suit to work and didn't have to scrub my body in order to be presentable afterward.  While I certainly wasn't wealthy, I was financially stable and in no danger of finding myself living on the streets.  I was living a form of the American Dream.

However, I felt, at best, unsatisfied.  There was nothing in my life that really drove me to exceed any limitations.  I had lived a life, up to that point, that had included many moments where I overcame odds to achieve something... and at that time, I felt like I was no longer achieving anything, except the growing of my waistline.

There were good things in my life, but I didn't feel there was anything exciting that came from me.  All the excitement came from outside and beyond my control.  I wanted to change that and I didn't know how.

This was what led me to try writing.  I had written before, but never fiction.  I had been an editor for my high school paper, I had written blogs about my favorite sports teams...was even doing so at the time.  I was getting some minor recognition for that, and even a little income. The blogs gave me an excuse to feel like I was slightly more than the average guy that talked sports with his buddies at work or called in to vent his opinion on sports radio.  But even in that realm I felt like I was external to the action.  I wasn't playing the games, I was just reacting to them.

I wanted something that was more than a reaction.  I wanted to create. I don't remember exactly what made me decide to try creating erotic fiction.  I know that I was reading it at the time. I had often read erotic writing, whether it was something as mundane as Penthouse Forum or something more exotic, like Lady Chatterly's Lover or The Story of O.  I had always enjoyed it.

I've always had a healthy interest in sex. Perhaps even more than healthy.  I had, in my youth, made efforts to push the boundaries of my own experiences.  I had been somewhat successful in doing so, if my conversations with others were any indication of what was a "normal" amount of sexual experience.  Certainly some of my friends viewed me as having had unusual experiences. They thought me a bit wild  and I somewhat reveled in that. But just as I felt that I had quit having experiences where I overcame odds, I also felt that my sexual adventures, if they could truly be called that, were behind me.  My wife and I shared a fairly healthy sex life, I believed.  But there was nothing really exciting about it, nor was it as big a part of our life as I wanted it to be.

Part of how I dealt with that last fact was in a fairly typical way for a middle-aged American male.  I became interested in other people's sex lives.  But porn movies have to be watched somewhere, and I had kids and a wife who clearly did not approve of that form of entertainment.  Because of my blog writing and the fact that I was a bit more of a night owl than anyone else in the family, I often found myself still on the computer after the rest of the family had gone upstairs to bed.  This led to me discovering the world of internet erotic fiction, specifically a website called Literotica.  I became a fan.  The stories did as much for me as movies did, and sometimes I could even wake up the wife when I eventually went upstairs and she would respond in a willing, if not enthusiastic, manner.

In addition to the pages of stories, there was a bulletin board style section where people talked to each other. I soon discovered that many of the people writing the stories participated in these forums.  The evidence that these were just normal people and didn't seem that different than me struck a chord.

A few weeks later, I published my first naughty story on Literotica.  It was pretty much a retelling of my losing my virginity.  I changed the names and a couple of the circumstances, but most of it was a true recount of my own first time.  I got comments and votes and people seemed to like it.  So then I made something up, still with some real events in it, but the real mixed in with pure invention.  That one also got votes and comments, but even more positive.  That led to my new hobby.  I also joined in the conversations in the forums.

Then came the event that really changed things for me.  I wrote a story based largely on a night that happened when I was in college.  It was kind of easy to write becuase it starred a couple of the most colorful people I knew in college.  There was a sex situation and a sex scene, but the real key to what made the story enjoyable wasn't the action but the personalities.  And it did really, really well.  Eventually, it won a "story of the year" award in it's category.  ("Wingman" is still on Literotica and continues to garner positive votes and comments to this day, more than twenty years later.  The story has been viewed more than two hundred thousand times.)

What snowballed from there was a situation where I eventually became a published author.  Able to share my fantasies and creations with a public that actually paid good money that they had worked for and earned to be entertained by me.