Getting Real: The Road to Personal Redemption (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781490373348)

A C6/C7 quadriplegic freelance writer/photographer sees the world from a slightly different perspective, and perhaps that's been my edge. I've enjoyed creating 100+ magazine bylines through the years, penning a Knight-Ridder syndicated Sunday column called "Disabled in America" based in the Detroit Free Press, authoring three "Stick Foster" mystery novels published in hardback by Walker and Company and in paperback by Vivisphere, co-writing a self-help book called GETTING REAL: The Road to Personal Redemption with Dick Todd, and, most recently, writing a contemporary novel called The Ghostwalker File, and a series of children's tales in the Native American traditional "animal story" or "lodge fire story" style. I just turned 61, and liked to think of myself as retired here in the Florida Keys, but now I'm not sure writers can ever truly retire. In 2011, my fiction muse flew back from whatever island it retired to and forced me to write The Ghostwalker File, a warm and very human novel about the life of one John D. Ghostwalker, who, as a newborn baby, was dropped off at the entrance to the Miccosukee Indian Museum Village in the Everglades just west of Miami. After being adopted by the tribe, lovingly raised by a conglomeration of Native American tribal families, John grows up to be a highly talented architect and an unusually quirky human being who creates his own private sancuaries on other peoples' properties. John's journey of self-discovery has provided me with months of enjoyment, and whether the novel finds a mainstream publisher or not, I look forward to making it available for my fellow Kindle users in the fall of 2012.