Update! I was sick as a dog for all of December and half of January, so haven’t posted in a while. Now that I’m up and running again, I’ll be posting more.

This last week, it’s been all about the Charlie WWll projects. Charlie was my beloved stepdad and a Marine with the Third Marine Division in World War ll. I began interviewing him in the ‘90s. It was very slow going. I lived in New York, he and Mom lived in Illinois, and I only saw them once a year in the summer. The interviews were so hard on him, we only did one interview a visit, sometimes two. I was “heartless and cruel,” as my mom described it, because he’d cry sometimes and I just waited. I never called a halt to it. We just kept going. “Ma, I can’t make anything up,” I told her. “He has to tell me everything he can tell me. I’m not gonna dishonor all this by writing fiction. He has to tell me.” And he did. Hundreds of hours interviewing, hundreds of pages of transcribed tapes, thousands of pages of research. He fought on Bougainville, Guam and Iwo Jima, so it’s one book for each island. He died two weeks after our last Iwo Jima interview. My grief was so intense, everything I tried to write after he died was maudlin crap. So I put the Charlie projects aside and wrote other stuff. First my memoir Freak: The True Story of an Insecurity Addict, then Manifest Destiny, a sci-fi novel about a futuristic society where medieval torture can legally be used “in certain cases,” and a children’s book I wrote and illustrated called Hurt Magic, which came out last year (2025]. At last, I found that I could finally write about Charlie again, so began working on it in 2024. I’ve got the first draft of the Bougainville book done, the first two screenplays written, and this month is dedicated to the third screenplay: Iwo Jima. What a story, my friends. What he lived through. What he did was nothing less than saving the world. You’re going to love him.