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For each of us, there are those dreams like a river. Some of us build rafts and float upon them like modern day Huck Finns, others allow the beavers of daily routine to build dams from bank to bank. The good thing about a river, though, is that its power cannot be contained for long. Eventually, it will gather enough force to crash through the rickety structure blocking it or it will build up enough water to spill over the obstruction. For the latter, only portions of the dream ever materialize.

For me, that river is writing. Since I was seven years old, I have dreamed of being a writer. At that time, I wrote short stories and poetry, hacking away at a typewriter, clacking out page after page and filling countless spiral notebooks with verse. In high school, the muse stood behind me, rubbing my neck with one hand while holding a whip in her other. I wrote more profusely, albeit poorly (by my contemporary standards). It was the usual rhyming drivel mimicking the sentiments of Hallmark cards while employing the archaic language of poets gone centuries before.

In college, the muse brought a friend and they tag-teamed me. One held a whip, the other a baseball bat with nails pounded through at various angles. I had no choice but to write. The three of us skimmed across the water on my small, rectangular raft. It was during that extended period in undergraduate studies (yes, very extended), that I wrote my first novel--a series of intermingled short stories that told a greater story. Then came novel number two. All the while, I churned out poetry. Not the stuff I excreted in high school, but genuine, thought-provoking, musical poetry that held captive the audiences of several local open mics.

While working on my masters, I finished novels three, four, five, and six. Four and five were religious novels written with my parents in mind. Six was a vampire novel. But it wasn't your ordinary bloodsucker novel. It was more the story of characters and their problems. It just happened that some were vampires. What they faced differed little from what each of us faces every day. Like everyone, they found themselves struggling with the battle between mind and body, soul and material.

During this time, I also wrote several volumes of poetry, experimenting with form until I created something I enjoyed mastering.

And then I graduated. It was at that time the beavers started working. Hundreds of furry little paddle-tailed critters labored feverishly to gnaw down trees and lay them across the river. The raft slowed. The muses whipped and beat, but the bossman was an octopus. Not only did he have a couple of whips and a larger bat with bigger nails, but he also had a hatchet, a sledge hammer, a pistol, and a shiv--no doubt taken from a previous inmate. He knocked the muses into the water, where they drifted behind the raft until, finally, we all came to rest at the edge of the dam.

Bossman took a wife and moved her onto the raft. Then they had a couple of children. The four of them had seven weapons each with which they attacked me continuously for nearly eight years. From the water, the muses kept one hand on the logs of my raft, clinging for life. The seven of us hovered there, sometimes spinning slowly in the wind, other times not moving at all.

Unable to stand it anymore, I kicked the bossman in his bulbous head and stole his sledgehammer. When I bashed the beavers' dam, limbs and leaves gave way with a loud crack! At first, only a ribbon of water tore through their abode, but then it widened, cutting through like a growing saw. Finally, the tension broke. Both halves of the dam swung upon like double doors and the water flooded through. The sudden jerk of motion caught bossman and his family off guard and they all fell into the water as my raft lurched forward. I grabbed the muses and helped them up as we sped down the river.

Along came multiple short stories and novel number seven. It is this novel which I am finally trying to publish. As my muses and I rip over the rushing current, I am scouring the banks and other rafts for an agent. Fortunately, bossman dropped his pistol, so I can take pot shots at every beaver I see. My river flows unobstructed--I wonder where it will take me.