Walking Out of the Dark: Bad luck took his sight. With hope and humor, my brother didn't let it take more. (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780993240218)

As a kid, every family get-together had adults playing cards, while they competed with long stories and short retorts. The result was a lot of loud laughs, which us kids could hear from a nearby woods. As a student, I had a strange fascination with grammar and words. I wanted to learn what each punctuation mark meant and how to give each word meaning, usually by using fewer of them. In recent years, it's more about pages than punctuation and words. Each page must earn and keep a reader's attention. Many successful writers describe their own way of working through this challenge. My way follows my other interests, like running marathons or cycling for a few hundred miles. Intense writing, running, and cycling all start with making time for them, each day. JK Rowling put it in a more colorful way, when she made a new year's resolution. She vowed to, "Guard the time allotted to writing as a Hungarian Horntail guards its firstborn egg." After a while, writing becomes a lifestyle. My favorite way to start a day is to have more coffee than I should and convert the caffeine into pages, many of which I actually use. I recently finished my first novel, following the maxim "write what you know." I know my brother, and I respect how he lives and laughs about a challenge that slows down many good people, living with blindness. Mike lost his sight due to bad luck, so the book is really about working through it, sighted or not. Of course, I hope this book is successful, but that success matters less than it used to. I'll still start my mornings trying to earn and keep some reader's attention. That usually involves long stories and short retorts, but hopefully, my written words will be as good as the ones that many of us have heard during a game of cards.