Three years out from cancer surgeries and treatment, I'm still inspired by all the courageous people I met, but am writing full speed ahead, albeit with a deeper sense of the value of humor and not squandering the time we're given with the people we love. Writing fiction satisfies my sense of adventure in the everyday, ordinary people put to the test in all kinds of ways by ordinary and extraordinary events: the 14-year-old sister who can't save her brother from drowning, the mother of a vaccine injured baby, an old cowboy who ran away from a pregnant wife forty years earlier, the 16-year-old boy who tells it like it is as he struggles to live a whole lifetime in the year the doctor's give him once he's diagnosed with leukemia. For me, the miracle of writing is that mere words, albeit honed with a fierce red editing pen, can create these characters and make them friends.