"Do not fear death; fear the unlived life." Ever since I read that advice given by Pa Tuck in Natalie Babbitt's Tuck Everlasting, I have thought of that as my rallying call.  I do not want to come to the end of my days (at 52 years old, still—so I hope—a ways off) and look back and realize to my horror, "Wow, what a waste!"  A product of a bad childhood, I have stumbled through my adulthood, always though managing to keep on the path of my own happiness.  The one constant through all of it has been my writing, which has lived in symbiosis with my meandering that path.  My writing has served as my journal of that journey, and my journey has provided me the well of emotions and experiences to embue my writing and give it meaning.  For that I have always loved my writing, whom I consider my friend (at low points in my life, my only one—but, at those lowest points, I have never been alone, and that has made all the difference).  Though my short stories and novellas have served those dual roles well, it has been these screenplays which have truly fed my soul. I'm not even sure why, but the screenplays channel my emotions more than any other form of writing, and, when I combine that quality of them for which I am so grateful with the intellectual and creative challenge of my being able to tell an entire story, in all its layered complexity, only via the two mechanisms of what can be seen and what can be heard, I'm glad I came upon this medium of storytelling, which I have come to adore.  My screenplays make me feel something, and I'm proud to say they, at times, have made me feel the ecstatic agony which signals that I am truly alive and living the moment—Joseph Campbell's "the rapture of being alive".  I hope my screenplays will make others feel the same.  After all, we read stories, we tell stories, we watch stories, we hear stories, all so that we may feel something.  As I constantly remind myself: "Heart first; head second."