I see stories all around me: The old dog slowly moving along the sidewalk; a crow staring down at me from its perch atop a leafless dead tree. Things that might seem ordinary to most people, serve to stimulate my imagination. Anyone who knows me, will agree that I am a chronic day dreamer. The following are some of my story prompts ... and some of my not-so-normal inspirations.
THE INTREPID SON, was inspired by an experience I had when I was a young child. I was five years old, when I had a bizarre experience — something I have not to this day been able to make sense of. I often dreamed about the experience, the details becoming etched in my mind.
I was at the beach, near the town of Cape Charles, Virginia, when I saw a strange ship that 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 dreaming about it. As I grew older, I realized 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 SHIIP LIKE THIS ONE:
So ... the ship flew the black flag from the back of it with the skull & cross bones. The images are forever emblazoned in my memory. However, every time I've attempted to write about the experience, I just can't get started. Writer's block is something I don't often experience, and when I do, I usually quickly overcome it. I just cannot get past the scene where I am standing on a sand dune gazing at the ship. So I decided to write a story that played on the idea of seeing a ghost ship ... yes, I said it. A ghost ship.
Oh, by the way, I still have no explanation as to what I saw that day and it just won't go away. What I do know is, young children seem to have the uncanny ability to see things we adults can't perceive. Someday, I will write that story.
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. 
Although modern day science has not confirmed that extended time travel is possible, I believe it is indeed possible. Based on the premise of time travel into the future, I wrote ALEXANDER'S PARADOX because I genuinely believe that eventually humankind will time travel.
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 has actually lived for 0.02 seconds less than everyone else on the planet; because he 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 discovery, how far will humankind have advanced a thousand years from today? However, there are caveats to be considered.
THE SELF-HEALING HYPOTHESIS, STATES THAT TIME WOULD HEAL ITSELF FROM A PARADOX.
A person is about to alter an event in the present by traveling back to the past and altering the events that cause the events in the present day to happen. Then there will be another set of events that will cause the present-day events to happen, and so there will be reason for him to travel back in time, and thus the paradox would never happen ... or would it?
THE GRANDFATHER PARADOX
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?
Another theory:
THE TIME DISPLACEMENT THEORY
If you travel back in time and kill your grandfather, before your parent is conceived, your grandfather would be dead in his time, and you would, although still alive, be unable to return to the future. You would no longer exist in the future and you would exist in your grandfather's time to the point when your parent was conceived, therefore you would than cease to exist in the past.
When I was a child, my best friend was my dog Teddy. Teddy, a Chesapeake Bay retriever, was my constant companion while I was growing up. 
When I was sixteen years old, Teddy disappeared one day 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.
I got my inspiration for SON Of TERRA while I was considering climate change and the human contribution to global warming. I decided to wrote a story about mother nature's revenge. In this fantasy story, mother nature is sick and responds to humankind's abuse of the planet's resources and decides to rid the planet of its human infection. Mother nature sends an envoy to decide the fate of humankind.
Often in our lives, there are events that are permanently seared into our memory. The collection of short stories in FROM the HEART
is a collection of such events. Some of the stories are told almost entirely as the true events that they are, as experienced by me; others are based in part on true events. There are some stories that were inspired by movies and other media told as science fiction. 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 sixteen 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.