Last week, I said I'd tell you why it took me 40 years to become a fiction writer, despite being inspired by the great science fiction writers of the 50s and 60s. Well, here goes....I wanted very much to write novels, short stories - anything! - but I couldn't do it! Around 1985, a very good psychologist said, "You suffer from chronic depression! Let's do something about it!" So, he prescribed the standard medication of that time, lithium, and, after a month, the depression did lift. I'd never realized that leaves were as green as they could be and the colors of flowers could be so intense. There was only one problem - I still couldn't write! Lithium cuts off the extremes of emotion to make you emotionally level, and that's not a good thing for a writer (this one, anyway). I couldn't tap into love or rage or any emotion in between. Then, about 10 years later, the best thing happened - I got sick! Standing over a pan of hot oatmeal one January day, I was suddenly hit by vertigo. I simultaneously felt as if I were ten feet tall at one moment and was going to put my face in the oatmeal the next. At the same time, the noise of a freight train and a screaming jet engine had entered my right ear. "Okay," I said, "this is not good!" So, off to the doctors I went, and they eventually diagnosed a non-cancerous "Acoustic neuroma." In other words, I had a mass in my head pressing on the auditory nerve. A few months later the surgeons cracked open my head and found out it wasn't a mass - it was a cyst. So, they filled it up with fat from another part of my head and sewed me back up. I lost a little hearing and that was that. So, what does this have to do with writing? Well, I was extremely depressed after the surgery (no income, etc.), so the psychologist prescribed Prozac. Two weeks after taking it, I was standing in the kitchen again when the antidepressant kicked in with a vengeance! It was actually like a cartoon where the light bulb of an idea goes on over the character's head! "Wow," I thought, "I can write and I can draw. All I have to do is work at it!" And I did. Four novels, several short stories, and four non-fiction books later, I'm a testament to the miracles of modern science. Oh, it wasn't easy adjusting to the antidepressants! I went through three or four of them before finding one that had few side effects. But it was worth it! And it shows how lucky I was and what a crooked path you sometimes have to take to get where you need to go....Next week, let's talk about ghosts...family ones!