Don't know why it took so long to get this started. I love to write, and enjoy knowing that the writing is being read - by someone. It's been a lifelong thing for me, starting at age 10. Kind of a spiritual adventure, it is. Squeezing my mind and drawing at random from the many and varied stories that I see every day. The weather. Rosie the cat. Music, heard or remembered. And things plucked from the endless flow of ideas that seem to accompany me throughout any given day.

Storytelling is the point of the exercise. Every time. Reworking the world into new ways of seeing, or just plain looking. Nature is always a prime mover, from which comes the patterns and flows that direct the words into place, with every given hope that they will mean more to the reader than they do to me. Alluding to beauty, and maybe even mystery, with any kind of luck at all.

Joe Baxter was my only true mentor. He was my high school journalism teacher. Kind of an odd man, but one who mostly smiled. His encouragement was guarded, and bloomed in me much later, long after he was gone.

As for inspiration, there's always Mark Twain, and Henry David Thoreau. James Blaylock and Whitley Streiber. Carl Hiaasen and Al Burt - from the old South Florida days. And the truly amazing prose of Neil Gaiman. Fabulists are usually my favorite writers. Writers who use imagination like a torch, to cut through the bars of reason and habit that keep the world in place on any given day. I should also mention Neil Young. His ability as a storyteller, in song rather than in prose, is eerie beyond description. The man knows magic and he is not afraid to use it!

For magic is what this is really about. That's one reason that dear Raven bears top billing in this blog. Shapeshifter and creator, his totem Medicine drives me when I cannot be driven. My writing flies best when Raven is on the wing. It's not a New Agey belief as much as it is a form of reverence born of experience. Also mentioned in the description of this blog is the Lady of the Lake. That spirit is a little more tricky to account for. I'll have to let her do that as we go along. She is the one who showed me how the bridge between dreams and waking is a solid and useful thing. Bringing new and fresh dreams into the real world is both a renewing and refreshing pastime. Why wouldn't it be? The words sorta make it so. And that's what I am on about in these pages. Should be fun.