My first published book, Circleforks, was released in May 2005. Additionally, I served as the associate editor for SCIFTS for six years, a monthly technical food industry publication. I’ve resided in Southern California all my life and have been in the food industry, in Research and Development, then graduating into Technical Sales, for ten years. Additionally, I have been fortunate enough to experience a wide variety of travel, both domestically and internationally over the last few years, a definite motivating element to my writing career.
A Like Affair was a privilege to write, inspired by what I’ve always called “the definition of a man.” After meeting him four years ago on a plane through Northwestern skies, I am forever indebted to the spark he ignited deep within, and to the gift of trust he inscribed unto my heart. As I made my way through A Like Affair, I grew as a writer, and fell in love with the characters as they came to life over a thirty year time period through the pages. A secondary and equally critical underline for this book was the late 1970’s movie, Same Time Next Year, which told the story of a chance encounter between two “married to others” pair. Over the course of thirty years, the two characters, George and Dorothy, met at the same picturesque northern California Inn, The Heritage House, cultivating a controversial and spell-binding relationship.
Near the conclusion of A Like Affair, I made the long drive to Mendocino
simply because I had to see where Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn breathed life into this movie, and put the final stamp of approval on my story. The entire picture, from the crisp air, to the endless cliffs, down to the icy blue waters and snow-like bluffs, the smell of intimacy in the air, to the classic rooms that still stand at this historical inn, Same Time and Next Year… all transcended words. I can only hope that I’ve done George and Dorothy justice with my contemporary duo against their three-decade legend.
I am blessed with the passion to write. And doubly blessed to have met an inspiring man that restored my faith in his sex. And finally, I hope to have conveyed the message that it is simply cliché that love and lust must be the dominating forces in a relationship. Whereas liking one another typically serves as merely the starter fluid in the hope of a veritable “happily ever after,” A Like Affair creates an entire life around the alternative. I hope we can all find our own personal ‘like affair’ in this life and learn how to “just be.”
I wrote Circleforks in an attempt to heal myself, at a time in my life that represented unchartered, terrifying, exhilarating, and frazzled territory. In many ways, navigating my way through Circleforks was therapeutic, a virgin template with an amorphous mass to attempt to hug. Reading through it and living it on the page was and still is more revealing than any of the naked activities that have helped shape my journey thus far.
Despite the heavy tense, the thick layers inherently drawn throughout the wading by this curious child Middle, I hope what you took away, in whatever form you took it, was tangible, distinctive, that if felt like your own. I will never forget one of the agents who critiqued my book before meeting me. As I walked up to her, she didn’t hesitate in telling me that I was her most difficult author to pin a body to the voice that fell between the pages she had read. Here I came, in my sunny apparel sporting California with a lifelong vengeance, and all she knew of me was the first fifty pages of my book. Imagine what she must have been expecting.
Which leads me to the point of this ramble… rather, the words after the words, speaking on behalf of the words. I lived this book, this unusually colorful, sad, beautiful journey, and with the exception of some of the mechanisms of flow, and the sacred right given to an author to embellish, that was me sitting, standing, struggling, and occupying a host of unsettling positions in this tale. I have found that it is often hard to separate self from our experiences, self from those powerful influences in our lives, self from getting caught up in the rush of momentum, instead of recognizing the imprint of “now.” And being able to take that imprint and not let it become less important as a “now” despite the landscape that lay ahead.
I am drawn to tattered unkempt journaling, with a deliberate yet grueling omission to invite the ‘editor.’ A journal can be a collection of napkins, tattoos, even voice messages, but to capture what you think when you’re thinking it is pure oxygen for me. I am double blessed in that I love to write and I possess a human journal as my best friend, Gabriel Salas, to whom I am inordinately grateful for his presence every day I am alive. And I am grateful that I found Circleforks within me, that ‘it’ allowed me to chronicle myself into healthier spaces, places, and mostly, an enhanced capacity to feel enabling a high definition life.
I hope that you heard the voice behind Circleforks, that the language engaged you, that the characters struck you just as they glue me, that the narrator was a sort of mood ring for you, and that you become completely captivated by your own moments.
Because at the end of the day,
that’s really all any of us have.
Thank you for taking this
journey with me.
