Writing fiction is a very serious and skilled business as well as being terrific fun. Unlike professional non-fiction writing, however, quality controls are harder to find and assess. So what is presented here is offered with even greater caveats than you will find elsewhere on this website about the value of what you might be poised to read.

Some of what follows is light – very light – written simply for your amusement. The rest is more serious – my attempt to explore themes of personal responsibility in the context of modern marriage.

It has simply been my experience that two of the great driving forces in the personal lives we all lead are those of humor and passion. Humor is the great oil of social interaction. If deployed without malice, it is the fastest generator of immediate human happiness that I know; and passion – well, where would any of us be without it. The passion between two people is one of the most powerful, and yet also one of the most dangerous, forces that any of us ever personally release.

The fiction that follows explores humor and passion in equal measure. The essay on Christopher Columbus, and the novel about Rose Tudor-Crump, have been written simply to make you laugh. The soon to be published novel, “Lying Close to the Sky,” was written with more complex goals in which laughter hardly figures at all. I hope you enjoy both routes through the fiction, and find them worthwhile.

FICTION

The essay Christopher Columbus and Me: Thoughts on Entering America was first published in 2003 as an entry for the Northcliffe Electronic Publishing Company’s eighth Toowrite competition. Removed from their website in 2009, along with all other eighth competition entries, it is reproduced here. PDF Word
	The novel, The Thighs of Rose Tudor-Crump: An Everyday Story of University Folk, was published by Infinity Publishers in December 2008. Its opening chapter is reproduced here. PDF Word The full novel is available for inspection and purchase at Wake Forest University College Book Store; or online from Barnes & Noble, where selected pages are available to be read. Direct purchase (and what Infinity call “a sneak peak”) is also possible from the publisher. The relevant websites are: Click here to visit the Wake Forest University College Book Store Click here to buy from Barnes & Noble Click here to buy from Books on the Web
	Lying Close to the Sky was first written in 2002. Like all serious novels, it has now had several iterations and at least one change of title. Shorter, different, and certainly more elegant than its initial draft, the final novel is still under review. The opening pages are here for your inspection. PDF Word Full publication details will follow shortly. The planned book cover for Lying Close to the Sky is "Goddess II," a painting by Cindy Taplin. To see more of her work, go to www.cindytaplin.net.