As far back as I can remember, I wanted to write. When I was six years old, my mother got a new typewriter - IBM Selectric, the latest rage in typewriters - and she put her old one outside the attic door for my dad to put in storage. I found it, put a piece of paper in it, and started tapping out a story. As I grew up, I continued to tap out stories on that typewriter until it died and I developed the ability to write by hand. My stories went into college-ruled, spiral-bound notebooks. Then, when I went to college and my parents bought me Toshiba laptop with WordPerfect 4.1 installed, my stories went digital.

For a good ten years, I tried to write a novel titled Blind Faith, about the American worship of a political system forged in the distant past that no longer served the country. A group of young leaders won an electoral victory and took power in Washington to bring real change. They put in their plan, and the rich and powerful threw the country into a civil war to stop them from upsetting the existing arrangement of power. The forces of good would emerge victorious with the task of rebuilding a shattered nation on more equitable lines. The idea still burns deep in my mind, and those characters still live in my imagination.

The modem allowed computers to talk to each other and let us form online communities. Before the World Wide Web, there were Bulletin Board Systems, BBS for short, where we could engage in conversations on message fora and even play games and chat - one person at a time. It all exploded with the Web, though. Our little BBS friend circles became more like online cities and towns. It was in the online community of Xanga.com where Lost Muse was born in 2006.

I was 40, unhappy, trying to become a high school teacher and in my copious spare time writing a novel called Broken Doll about an abused teenage girl. She was going on anti-depressants and I wanted research. I had never taken them myself so I went looking online for first-hand accounts of what it was like from teenagers. I stumbled across Xanga and the world of online diaries. Wow. So I started my own blog and took the name Lost Muse. People called me Muse. I wound up publishing Broken Doll on that Xanga after the rejection letters stopped coming, and at the same time published a "blog novel," a serialized story that I wrote on that blog. It was fun. People read my writing, and they loved it.

Then life moved on and Xanga's day was over and Lost Muse dissipated into the mists of my amnesia. I kept writing off and on, which is to say I kept starting stories that were supposed to change how people think about the world, and then not finishing them. Some of those stories will show up in these pages, and maybe get finished. As Lost Muse.

Why Lost Muse? Why back to a name almost 20 years abandoned? Probably because that was the one time in my life when people read my writing passionately, when a story of mine impacted lives. It felt good. I want to feel that again. Besides, I've always thought it was a cool name with layers of meaning and a sort of literary timelessness to it.

Welcome to my site. Whether you got lost and stumbled on it or came here with some purpose, I hope you enjoy my musings.