The only thing I know for certain as my 18th month with no fixed home draws to an end is what Eulisha tells Toshar early in The MoonQuest, the same thing Pyrà tells Kamela in the opening scene of The Bard of Bryn Doon, soon-to-be rereleased fourth Q’ntana book: "There’s more to every story." There’s more to my story as well. And all I can do is listen for it and follow where it takes me, in the ongoing act of surrender that is my life. 

It took all the courage I could muster at age 20 to call Gay Montreal and stammer "I-I think I'm gay" into the phone, then take the bus downtown and purposefully talk about it, face-to-face, with a gay man.

“Not only am I not yet finished with The MoonQuest (as I thought I was), its StarQuest sequel will take me eleven confused and frustrating years to complete. Not the book itself. The first draft!”

I am still The MoonQuest story, just as I was that March evening in Toronto 30 years ago…the story of a bard who follows his heart and lets the tales that move through him reveal the way forward as he journeys on a quest to return story, imagination and vision to the land.

Sedona has kept me here just long enough to launch two extraordinary (and unanticipated) projects. Now, it’s time to move on. But where?

A year later in rural Nova Scotia, on the anniversary of that Toronto class, I complete the first draft of my first book — a novel I never planned to write, a novel I knew nothing about except as I wrote it word-by-word: The MoonQuest.

“Even as I’m back where I started 179 days ago, I don’t sense that I’m here to stay. At the same time, it feels as though there was a moment during these past nineteen Sedona days when I arrived at the end of this Yellow Brick Road. I’m not sure I can identify the moment, at least not yet. Perhaps it will be unmistakably clear in retrospect. Or perhaps there wasn’t a single moment. Maybe it has been more of a passageway than a portal…”

“The bigger miracle, however, showed up a few days later: One of the people who listened to my DIY recording , someone I barely knew, offered me a generous seed money donation to get The MoonQuest audiobook project started at a local recording studios. My acting as though was making it so!”

People are always commenting on my prolific creative output (20 books and five screenplays). But what you might not know is that I was a late bloomer. I didn't start writing my first book, "The MoonQuest," until I was 39, having spent many of the preceding years doing my best to avoid all things creative!

I had no choice: I would have to trust. Unconditionally. And I would have to reassure those fearful parts of me that I have always been taken care of. Even during those three harrowing months between Portland and Sedona, a 2019 journey I chronicle in Pilgrimage: A Fool’s Journey, I was never abandoned. There was always a miracle…then another…then another. I didn’t run out then. Why would I now?

"I am a writer. Period." I wasn't so sure about that while writing The Bard of Bryn Doon, which was such an intensely challenging experience that I was seriously tempted to give up. Often. And not only on this book, but on *all* books. Somehow, though, I managed to get through it, and I now think that my newest book may be my best yet! I guess I'm going to keep a writing after all!!

If you’ve read the acknowledgments pages in any of my books, you will know that I am highly sensitive to the energy of place and that I always thank those locales that inspired me in writing that particular work. Well, a few days ago, as I was preparing the acknowledgments for my newest book, it occurred to me that of my soon-to-be-19 books, 17 had been conceived, written and published here in the US!

I'm not saying that I could not have been as creative or successful had my car not turned left instead of right 24 years ago today, but as this country is where I have experienced the bulk of my creative output, today seemed the perfect day to acknowledge that.