A good place to write...

    The bungalow I lived in while in Englewood, Florida was a great place to write. It has big oak trees dripping with Spanish moss in the yard along with an orange tree and lots of flowers, birds that sing almost constantly and a gentle breeze off Lemon Bay. Combined, they provided the  atmosphere I needed to get about the business of finally turning all those ideas for novels and short stories into reality; something that I never really had time to do during my nearly half century as a journalist.
    So it was that after retiring as publisher of the Englewood Sun I set to work. In the first year of my retirement, before moving here to Reus, I wrote the rough drafts for seven novels (one of the good things about being a single man of a certain age is that you can stay up all night writing if you want to) and actually polished two of them to the point where I put them on Kindle. "Corpus Delectable," a murder mystery set in Lewes, Delaware and "The Ashtabula Irregulars: Opening Gambit," a Steampunk adventure, have been online for a little more than a month and though sales aren't through the roof, they are actually selling.
    One of the things that initially concerned me when I started thinking seriously about moving to Reus was whether or not I'd be able to write here as I had in Englewood. This is, after all, a city and the trees are in parks and plazas, not my front yard. In Englewood the birds that regularly visited my yard were wood storks, great blue herons, great egrets, cardinals, blue jays and mockingbirds along with palm wrens, finches and a wide variety of song birds. Here, we have pigeons. Lots and lots of pigeons.
    I needn't have worried, however. Reus has a wonderful energy about it and it's a city that even at 3 o'clock in the morning has people in the streets. It's not the same as Englewood in any sense of the word but it's a wonderful place to write... so wonderful that I'm just putting the finishing touches on my third novel for Kindle - a political thriller called "The Session."
    Life is good.