A Rough Season, a Memoir

06/09/2017

POZ Magazine will be doing a piece on "A Rough Season" in a future issue and I will be joining their blog team soon. I'll let you know when and where to check it out.

29/06/2017

After several weeks of social justice volunteer work, it's time to get back to writing. We had a successful town hall meeting at St. Paul's on June 15, a press conference for National HIV Testing Day on June 26, and I manned the St. Paul's testing site on June 27. All of this required seemingly endless planning meetings, which took up most of my writing time. Now I'm back to promoting my book. On today's agenda, letters and a copy of my book to AARP Magazine and POZ Magazine, and catching up with my blog. I'm looking forward to a lot of writing time in July, plus a little travel (trip to the Bay Area).

20/06/2017

President Trump "doesn't care about HIV." These are the words of one of the members of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS: "We decided that the administration was not listening to people living with HIV, was not interested in engaging with HIV advocates around this issue or the healthcare reform bill, wasn't interested in having that bill informed by the experiences of people living with HIV or the experts that work in this field or the science, and that once we saw that they were going to simply push through a health bill that was going to dramatically impact and negatively affect people living with HIV, that we could no longer stand by and work within the administration, that we had to step up and force a discussion around this topic," said Scott Schoettes, who resigned on Monday.

Guess we can't complain that Trump is discriminating against the HIV/AIDS community. He isn't talking to anybody on the subject of healthcare, and neither is the Senate!

09/06/2017

Poetry
June 09, 2017

I don't write poetry, so I had very low expectations when I took a poetry workshop at Cal State Bakersfield a couple of weeks ago. So I was pleasantly surprised when I not only had fun, but wrote some not-so-bad poetry (at least that's my opinion). We got lots of fun writing prompts. I also learned some technical stuff, like metaphors, anaphora (word or words that begin a succession of lines), and Epiphora (words that end a succession of lines). Here's one that I wrote:

I left my dream in the Return Book Bin in the Library
I left it there on purpose
I left it for someone else to find
I left it to inspire someone
I left it there so my dream could become someone else's
dream
I left my dream so that someone could share my dream
I left my dream in the Return Book Bin in the Library so
that it will come true.

Not exactly Nobel Prize material, but lots of fun. I think I'll probably write some more. Certainly a lot easier than writing a novel. And with so much of my time going to promotion the book I've already written, I'm not getting very far with anything else.

08/06/2017

Thanks to everyone who's following this page!

My memoir, A Rough Season, is a story of disease, recovery, love and inspiration. It talks about my

08/06/2017

My add is up and running. I know, because I've been charged.

07/06/2017

First attempt at "boosting" my post to see if I can sell some books.

07/06/2017

My book launch party at Art Center Gallery on May 18, 2017