[I just discover this post had been a draft for over a year.  It's actually from October, or maybe November, of 2014.  I should've post this earlier, but now is as good any time.  And please check out the post for the collective novel for my friend Bill Mansker.]

Been a year since I post on my blog.  That's partly because of bizarre circumstances.  I lost my password to Google Mail, and when I changed it to be get back in, the email was sent to the very Google mail account I couldn't get into.  So I spent time doing other things.  Not until I realized I had my old Firefox program on my laptop was I able to get back into it.  Store password and all.
So now I can work on my blog again.
In the Interim I was working the revisions to my novel The Gonaymne Weapon, which is forthcoming from Montag Press.  I struggled with the revisions, but once I got into making the changes, things began to move rather smoothly.  My editor, Mara Hodges, made some great suggestions and I confess they came out really well.  A fine more minor suggestions to be dealt with, and it should prove a great read.
I've also been working on two other novels and some non-fiction.  One of the novels, which I'm calling Nirvana Express, is something I've been struggling with for a long time.  It's a novelization of my late first wife's life, with a strong fantasy element thread running through it.  It was really the only way for me to make it work.  My first wife told me also sorts of stories about her life, which I happen to know are true.

So let me tell you about her.  Her name was Vicki Sue Brown, and she eight years older than me (Among my other peccadillos, I've had a thing for older women, but now those older women are my age.)
As it happened, she'd been the teen-age mistress of an older, well-know music producer.  She was the daughter of a the president of the National Conference of Christian and Jews.  Her dad was a Texas farm boy who managed to overcome a hardscrabble life to go to college and eventually earn a doctorate in divinity studies.  He taught at Drake and at the Institute for Religious Studies at OU in the late 1930s.  The Institute was accused of communist sympathies.  He met my first wife’s mom in Norman, She was the daughter of a local dry goods store owner.

Vicki had been an editor with a literary magazine at the University of Oklahoma, where we  both went to school and where we met.  Later she was an editor for the University of Oklahoma Press.

Hell, my own life, I realized seems like a novel.

At one point, however, she began having auditory hallucinations the she was supposed to return to India for some of spiritual bless. 

Rocky was hardly the word for it.  She tried to killed herself, twice, and, fortunately, her mom was still alive then.  The death of her mother, however sent her over the edge.  One I came home from work and found she wasn’t there.  It was at work the next day that a hotel in Tulsa called me to say my wife and been found unconscious in one of their rooms.  She’d tried to overdose on pills and booze.  The hotel staff found her and got her to the hospital.  I had to drive the 120 miles to get her. 

I moved out and into my own house and resumed my relationship with nancy, who later became my wife.  During that period, I’d worked at jobs, including being the editor of a semi-weekly news paper in a suburb if Oklahoma City,  I managed to survive until

I'm not really a Xmas person.  Thirty-one years ago I spent my last Christmas with my father.  I knew it was going to b his last.  He had been ill for so long with heart and liver issues as well as diabetes.  We had already had several scares and would have several more before he died in the spring of 1984.  I have now lived longer without my father being alive than with him.  Since that Xmas, I've never really enjoyed the holiday season.  It didn't help that I was apparently developing Seasonal Affective Disorder, with which I still suffer.  A year later, a few days before Xmas, my first wife lost her father.  He died on our wedding anniversary. Her mother died within the next year.  I lost my mom in 2004.  My first wife and I were divorced in 1989, and she--who was very bipolar--committed suicide in 1992.  Her sister, with whom I was close, died in 2011. Nancy and I have celebrated 25 Xmas season and we'll celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary on Jan. 1.  I don't know where the time went. Nor does anyone, I suppose.  Days like this make me realize my life is a minor soap opera, and Xmas is the annual low point.  But soon it will be spring.