Blu Rose and the Land of Saunt

Less is more in writing the author's notes, so, my eyes did not see, but my voice spoke what my mind's eye did envision, and my ears heard what my mouth had expressed, my hand recorded what my mouth and ears had divulged; thus, my eyes could forever read what my world had revealed to me. Although this was my course to sublimity, I can not stop the readers of this work from questioning its worth, having not turned the pages yet. It is for the reader to unravel the value of this book for themselves.

I have been writing short stories for over thirty years. This time I set out to make from the thin air a story of good versus evil, where the right would prevail over the wrong. I named the main character Blu Rose because at the time of the making of the story seven years ago (2006), there were no blue roses. I selected green roses as the elixir for the same reason.

I was traveling a stretch of Indiana highway between Indianapolis and Cincinnati, and I felt a story looming someplace in the air about me, and the first story came forth. It is chapter four, The Wizard. It is the story of Fredrick Broomstocker and the beginning of Blu Rose leaning to know herself. Liking the story, I decided to develop it. After a few weeks I repeated the act and another story came to mind. I then created a new story chapter, along the same stretch of road, and when stopped for the night, I would write down what I had told myself. This farmland of Indiana became for me the hollowed land of Blu Rose learning to know herself.

For confidence in editing I used the words of Dale Carnegie, Whatever the mind can conceive and believe the mind can achieve. I remember the distance from Milwaukee to Green Bay also setting an excellent stage for development of story lines; but it was New York State where I brought to life chapter twelve, The Deer in the Woods. It was created in the town where Elmer's Glue is made. I was spending the night along the river on the edge of the town in a dirt parking area and was hypnotized by a small lopsided tree whose leaves were being blown in the wind by the breeze. Chapter twelve is my favorite. That is how the novelette came to be.

The second story, a long short story, is The Land of Saunt. I will tell you first that I started making it up back in 1974 cursing about the local countryside, and I found the outline so charming that I wrote it down in a notebook. I forgot about it until 2007, when I was finished writing Blu Rose. Like a burst of luck, maybe just the level of creativity, no matter, I remembered the story. Within weeks I developed the plot and wrote a rough little story.

Solving the story comes about with five crystals. I had read of the five crystals of South America in a book and had made a mental record of them for years. In The Land of Saunt, you will learn of the Geometric people, and the problem they have come to by way of Ginger's crystal ball. The solution became self-evident and proved as pleasing as it was pleasant to the story plotting. Ginger's world then becomes a transparency for all and she moves on to search out her heart's desire.

The last piece of work is a poem, Walking in Confidence. I wrote it after winning a finalist award in the Dayton, Ohio Library Poetry Contest. I have not had the Ivy League university training in writing, nor have I had the workshops used by the bestsellers, but I have had the experience of traveling for a living, and I have visited some of the best museums on the earth. I have also spent more than enough time in the libraries--138 libraries last count. When I had the dream of the library, and it was really a dream, I had to write it. I have included it as the last piece of work because I owed something to the libraries that have taught me the masterful art of storytelling.

The book as a whole is all creativity, and yet it comes together from beginning to end in a singular harmonious logic, c