Next, my children. They are the light of my life, my pride, my joy, my dream come true above and beyond anything else this world has to offer. No matter how bad I have sometimes felt in the past, I had only to think of them and know they needed me. Without them, things would have been unbearable. With them, anything is possible.

My very best friend, Dee, has been by my side through thick and thin, from kindergarten. Loves have come and gone and she has always been there for me. I treasure her and the friendship we have. She, too, has always believed in me and encouraged me to keep writing, telling me how much she loved my stories and poems. She was probably one of the very first people to ever let read anything I wrote. Our long and solid past can only lead us into a long and solid future.

There are two men in my life, two loves who I love for very different reasons and in very different ways. Though I no longer live with Roger, the father of my children, he is still an important part of my life and I will always love him for the gifts he gave me, our kids. I have learned what it means to love someone unconditionally because of Rog. I learned that sometimes loving someone as much as I still love him means stepping away and letting them go just as he did the same for me. And then there is Charles, the man I have grown to love so very much since we first met back in 2000. He's taught me about myself, who I am, who I want to be and what incredible things I am capable of doing. He's made me stronger and more confident than I ever dreamed possible. He's inspired me many times over in many different ways and I look forward to many more years at his side doing all the things we love to do together.

And now the list of thank yous gets harder. My cousin Chris spent many years apart, lost from each other. It was not until quite recently that things changed and we have been given the chance to know each other better than we ever did as children. Chris has been a second pair of eyes for me, reading whatever I give her with that handy red pen of hers. Making suggestions, fixing typos and encouraging me every step of the way. A gifted writer in her own right, I can only hope that I can one day return the favor and share with her the happiness of seeing one of her stories published.

Then there is my dear friend across the Big Pond, Ian. It took the Internet to get us together, to "share a common secret" as it were. That little flash of fangs did the trick. We've had the pleasure of meeting but once, but what a wonderful couple of days those were, days neither of us will ever forget. I hope we get to meet again sometime without a great big pond between us.

To all my LiveJournal Friends, I say thank you for putting up with my endless babblings about my writing. I can only imagine how boring it must be to you to read how many words I typed over any particular weekend. I try to keep in interesting and I hope I don't sound too much like a broken record when I say, "Buy My Books". And an extra special thank you to Nancy for sending me to Pink Flamingo in the first place.

Last, but not least, I would like to thank my grandparents, my grandmothers in particular, Angeline and Jeanne. These two lovely ladies taught me many things, from how to make the perfect meatball, to how to interpret my dreams, how to appreciate a big, old empty house! While one was buying me a Ouija Board for my 13th birthday and telling me her true experienced with ghosts, the other was delighting in the little drawings and notes I would leave her all over the house. They have both passed away now but a day does not go by that I do not think about them and miss them deeply. And I know, because that's what I was taught by both of them, that physical death is not the end. There is another place we go to, a better place and sometimes we can even come back to our loved ones still here and be felt, heard and seen. I read someplace once that the only time a soul truly dies is when it is forgotten. These two women will never be forgotten for as long as I live.

Fans..., well, I must have some someplace out there, people I don't know who really like my stuff and are hoping for more. I hope I can deliver and not disappoint, be it erotica or what I really, deeply want to write and publish, horror. But, if fame and fortune are not meant to be mine on a grand and glorious scale, that's fine, too. As long as I can leave behind a couple handfuls of books and about 80 years worth of hand-written journals, I'm happy.