My ideal spot in the universe is anywhere the ocean is close enough for me to smell the sea water and feel its mists. The sight of waves, large and small, infinitely rolling to and from shore or crashing against rock is a given.

Such an experience doesn’t happen often enough for a writer who lives in land-locked Ohio.

Maybe it explains why I lean toward fantasy in my reading and writing. Or love irony.

Thank you to Enslow Publishers, Inc., who hired me to write two biographies, one about Francisco Pizarro and another about George W. Bush (2004). In 2010, the Antioch Writers’ Workshop Short Story Contest selected my “Crystal Love” third out of 100 entries. I was a top finalist for SWAN Day Dayton in March 2012 for my first chapter of my as-yet-to-be-published fantasy mermaid novel, When the Oceans Sang.

Romantic Ruckus (2014), edited by Kara Leigh Miller, includes two short stories, “Big Screen Romance” and “Migration.”

Most recently, “The Red Ball,” a futuristic short story, won Best Short Story at the Midwest Writer’s Workshop in Muncie, Indiana, in July 2015. It also earned me Top Writer prize out of short fiction, long and nonfiction and poetry.

Welcome, fellow dreamers.