Often in our lives, there are events that are permanently seared into our memory. FROM the HEART is a collection of stories inspired by true events. some are inspired by movies and other science fiction media. However, all the stories in this collection represent strong life changing emotions, which I chose to refer to as life storms. One of my favorite stories is based on Teddy, the Chesapeake retriever with which I grew up. There is a grey area concerning Teddy, because he disappeared one day when I was fifteen years old and I never saw him again. I decided to pay homage to my K9 best friend by writing a story about a devoted dog that was neglected by his master. Except, in this story the dog came home.

There is something I have not to this day been able to make sense of. I often dreamed about the experience, because the details have been etched in my mind. I was five years old and at the beach, near the town of Cape Charles, Virginia, when I saw a strange ship. It sailed up close to shore and then quickly turned away and disappeared. It didn't make sense to me then, however as the years passed, I kept recalling the experience as well as occasionally dreaming about it. As I grew older, I realizedjust how strange the incident had been. You see, I had never seen that type of ship before that day when I was five. My family lived in a rural town in the 1950's and we didn't have the luxury of a TV and I had never been to a movie. I didn't have access to magazines or books at that time that would account for any imagined images of what appeared to be a pirate ship circa 1700: A ship like this one: The images are forever emblazoned in my memory. Every time I've attempted to write about the experience, I get writer's block.

When I was about eight years old, I read the book by H. G. Wells, THE TIME MACHINE and I have been fascinated by the idea of time travel ever since. Based on the premise of time travel into the future, I wrote ALEXANDER'S PARADOX. Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev spent 803 days, 9 hours and 39 minutes in space orbiting the earth at a high rate of speed; in theory, he became the world's longest time traveler. This was due to the effects of TIME DILATION. Krikalev travelled 0.02 seconds into his own future. TIME DILATION is real and has been demonstrated in experiments conducted first by flying highly accurate atomic clocks around the world on high speed jet aircraft, and more recently by GPS satellites. If the modern humans have discovered this fact of time travel, at this juncture in human scientific, how far will humankind have advanced a thousand years from today; however, there are caveats to be considered. THE GRANDFATHER PARADOX is an example: If you travel back in time and kill your grandfather before he conceives one of your parents, which precludes your own conception and, therefore, you couldn't go back in time and kill your grandfather . . . or could you?

When I was growing up, my best friend was my dog Teddy. Teddy, a Chesapeake Bay retriever, was my constant companion. When I was sixteen years old, Teddy disappeared, and I never saw him again. I often wondered what happened to Teddy? With that thought in mind, I decided to write a story about a boy whose beloved dog disappears. However, when I began to construct an outline for the story, I developed writer's block. Later, while watching TV, the story of an abducted child ran on the local news. Unable to break my writer's block, I changed the story, which was essentially about my dog, to that of a missing boy named Teddy Riley, and SEARCHING FOR TEDDY RILEY became a novel. According to the National Incidence Studies of missing, abducted, runaway, and thrownaway Children, there are over 2100 children reported missing every single day in the United States. That equates to a child reported missing every 41 seconds! Around 800 of these daily reports turned out to be benign cases of miscommunication or a situation where the child was not, in fact, missing. On average 33 children were abducted every day by a nonfamily member.