Working on my newest project both terrifies and exhilarates me. We'll start with what terrifies me. I'm writing about teen-agers, folks. My protagonist at the beginning of the narrative is a fifteen-year-old woman. What do I know about fifteen-year-old women? The last time I spent any time around teenagers was when I was a teenager myself, some 50+ years ago. Trudy and I never had children, no kids or grandkids growing up around us in our home. My day job for thirty-five years was as a clerk at a liquor store. Any contact with teenagers there, and I'd get arrested. After fifty especially, I had very little contact with the "young". It's kind of a social thing. It's just the slightest bit creepy for a childless man to be around people much more than half his age. My attitude, for the most part, has been, I'll let them be them, and I'll be me. I'll respect the fact that they'd just as soon be among their own, as I did when I was their age.                                                                                                        ​              What most intimidates me is the concern that I may be disrespectful to my characters by not treating them with the authenticity they deserve, with the sort of authenticity that I've never seen on TV but have, on occasion, seen in films like Juno, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Superbad, and Matt Dillon's first movie ​Over the Edge. My fear is that I'll get a couple of years into this project only to realize that what I've produced is artificial and lifeless with caricatures for characters, and then I'd get despondent and stop doing it, and then where would I be? What would I write then?

     George R.R. Matin has famously said, and then probably regretted saying, that writers are either gardeners or architects. (What I took him to mean is that some people work off outlines while others work out their stories right on the page.) I do believe Martin missed at least one other category, though, and that is the category of archeologist. Both Stephen King and Ursula K. LeGuin have talked about this as being their approach. It's like the writer's imagination fills with this Fantastic Can't Miss Powerful Story Destined to be a Classic, and their job is to then use their training and experience and natural talent to transfer that Powerful Story from inside their head on to the page with as much of its original vibrant energy still intact as possible. For the last three decades, that's been me. I've been an archeologist. I had so many stories and bits of stories floating around in my head that it took me thirty years to convert them all into words.

     But that's all over.

     I'm not an archeologist anymore.

​     With this new series, I am a gardener

CONTINUE.