the lion is inThis book happened because of an anxiety attack.

I was worried about something… something that I knew wasn’t going to be resolved for a while, and I thought how can I ever get through this?  And that night when I went to sleep, I had a dream.  

A most vivid dream about three women and a lion.  I knew exactly how the women were dressed probably because I had been thinking about nothing but women and clothes because of our play Love Loss and What I Wore.

Lana was wearing ripped jeans, a t-shirt and those flat plastic shoes called Jellies.  Tracee was in a wedding dress and veil.  I knew Lana and Tracee were in their twenties, best friends from childhood, and there was an older women with them, who, when I woke up, I named Rita.  Lana, Tracee and Rita were in a strange place—a roadhouse, perhaps a seedy nightclub, built of all different construction materials hammered every which way.  Living inside this odd looking roadhouse by the side of a rural highway in North Carolina (a state I had never visited in my life) was the bar’s mascot—Marcel, the lion.

When I woke up, I wondered for a second if what I dreamed was real.  Then I knew it was my next novel.   For the two years I lived inside this world -- three women on the run, each with secrets, each with transgressions, real and imagined -- and the lion who would change their lives.

When I write, I can block out anything, well, almost everything—and writing this, living in this world, got me calmly through that anxiety attack, a situation resolved in  a month, and several more actually.  It took two years to write the book.


order Amazon

order Barnes & Noble

order independant