When I first envisioned making a web page years ago I had thought I might be up to a modest, basic autobiographical set of pages that my Internet acquaintances could get to see photos of me and learn a little bit more about me. It was during 96’ when I had first started chatting, shortly after the birth of my son, Jackie. But I had also began a novel during that year that I fully intended to not only finish, but to make it worthy of a possible screenplay at some future point. That is how firmly I believe in the story I brought to life.

Now in 99’ when I am finally able to make this site a reality, I have written over half of my second novel, "Two Wrongs Make a Light," about the dynamics of an abusive relationship taken to its extreme and one brave young woman’s struggle to make the best life she can for herself and her infant daughter after her abuser is shot by her mother during a attempt to inflict harm on everyone in the house. During the writing of this project, upon a reading of "Walk of Fire: An Amputee’s Struggle For Self-Acceptance," I found that my first novel needed more to it on some small points to add to its texture. I took time to embellish where I felt necessary and the result is a very inspirational story of one young man’s path.

I have always wanted to be a writer and have many ideas I want to develope into full blown tales over the next few years and I have learned that web page authoring need not be intimidating. Not with all the wonderful resources available online to help one make the site of their dreams. Usually the biggest question is: "what to put up there?" I have so much to share and say about things I see in the world about me that I feel should be shared. Poetry, books, and opinions are all expressions and what a better place to explore those then on the Internet?

It is my hope that by sharing some of my personal inner gardener with all of you that it might help you in your personal life to be more attentive to fertilizing your own precious inner garden where your dreams are born and seek to transcend their intangibility, by inspiring you to make them happen. Writing is a way for anyone to feel less alone and many people use it for escapism. Many use music as well. Everyone needs something to through themselves into and I feel that as we have moved forward into a faster paced society, with our instant messaging and cellular technology, we have left behind our personal dreamer inside ourselves in favor of the quick, passive gratification that comes with watching television.

Television has good and bad aspects to it, but then how many things don’t have a catch about its use? Point being that reading, although passive, is a very compelling satisfaction for those who need to read to feed their head things they wish they could do or know about doing. It is a very intimate connection, from one mind to another as the writer is telling it to you the reader and it is all from his inner garden. Experiencing J.R.R.Tolkien very early on in my life, through the movie "The Hobbit," I would learn there was an entire trilogy of book about the hobbits and middle earth.

Instant addiction was formed! I was hooked on that feeling of connection to the story, needing there to be a reason to its eventual resolution and feeling overjoyed upon ending it, only to pick up another of the series to go through it over again. I know I would be lying if I said I read it entirely a hundred times as I do not know how many times I consumed his works, but from their I moved into Piers Anthony who is a wonderfully talented man who prolifically adds to his Xanth series as fast as I read it. I was only in middle school, but the escapism was intense, so that I found myself reading over the weekends to compensate for lack of things to go do with my few friends.

I would quarantine myself to my room, two or three slices of white bread and maybe some cheese, then I would go sit on my bed and ball up the white soft parts of a slice of bread and then suck on it to make me feel more like I was roughing it off in some strange fascinating land. It was around that time I was allowed to ‘camp out back in the wonderful yard that itself, over the years became the most spectacular garden I ever saw or dreamed of having in my life.

I was lucky to have a really great step dad, Bede Angle, who made sure that even though we were vastly different in years, and he hadn’t had any children from his first marriage. No, Bede’s children are many, although I am the only flesh & blood one. His children were his paintings. Each painstakingly created from his own, prolific inner garden. Bede taught me so much about Art, drawing and the techniques of paint making and portrature. He was like a mad scientist in his lab.

Obsessed with finding the lost paint formula of the old masters. He devoted fifty years of his life to this pursuit and when he found formulas that worked, our family overjoyed, but we knew it was not about making money. He just wanted to make his paints in the same ways the old masters had made theirs. Somewhere in all his old scratched out notes and experiement results in notebooks, is the lost formula to balance oil and water to make a specially designed mix so that the evaporation rate is not to slow and not too fast. A good workable paint.

I have seen with my own eyes how beautiful the resulting paint felt to work with, as I was also lucky enough to be a student of Bede’s. For years he’d taught art and had even been a Professor at some University up North, long before our association. To Bede I was special. He loved my long hair and called it my crowning glory. As much as any man could, coming into a relationship with a woman half his own age who had a four year old daughter to contend with, Bede loved me with all his heart.

I have so many fond memories of those years with him as a child. His uncle, John Vanarsedale, owned an airline called PBA and on my first vacation with Mom & Bede, we went up North to take care of his loose ends from his divorce, involving selling a lovely old home in Vermont. Here I was a young girl from Florida, trying to adjust to new things at home, let alone adjusting to the atsmosphere of such a beautiful and historic area as Boston. This was the first real vacation I can recall and I will elaborate more about this later for your reading enjoyment.

It is enough for now, to post this page as it stands so far as it is my online journal of encouragement to myself and others who are interested in it. This where I will share with you a look into why i am the way I am and why I am so driven to pursue writing and making this one of the Internet's best personal home site for people to visit and use. I want to encourage people everywhere to sit at their computers and write! Web Page authoring is so easy and very satsifying to see your ideas made into a recognizable page for others to visit and give you feedback about.

So for today, September 30, 1999, I end this entry into the Garden and invite to come back next week to see what additions have been made by then. If you ahve any feedback or suggestions on things you would like to see added, feel free to send off an email to me. For now!