Bricks and Mortar

People have asked me where I get the ideas for my novels and I tell them that my material comes from basically two places. My imagination, for one thing, which is more than just active. It's seemingly boundless, a fictional treasure trove for which I am eternally grateful. The other source is a lot less mysterious and it has a big price tag attached to it. And that would be my own observations of life as I live it.

I've always lived a marginal existence, even when I appeared to be knee-deep in the muck and mire of typical human struggles for the same things everyone else was fighting for. Except that I was always standing outside looking in as I continued to work the inside like everyone else, doing it all but never really fitting in. Watching, making mental notes, dissecting, categorizing all the human and inhuman activity while I participated as best I could at the same time, wearing the performer hat and the audience hat and the critic hat and finding that none of them really fit very well.

Then I picked up the hat of the novelist at age fifty and liked the way it looked and felt. And now, what I have seen and suspected all along, I pass along to my readers.