A residency instructor once wrote of my medical histories to be most alluring. Thereafter, dramatizing medical histories was my only creative writing outlet (greeting cards being an exception). After many years in the practice of medicine, and volumes of medical histories chronicling my frustrated aspirations, on my first laptop I wrote a whimsical paragraph that challenged me to expand into a book. It eventually became my first born, Cry WaterColors.

Inspiration, I like to think, is granted on every encounter; but to have the view of Lake Tahoe, as I did while I wrote from my home, made inspiration pour like water from a spout. The view from my dinning table was the brush with which I painted the setting for my book. Ten feet of snow and calloused hands eventually led me to pack the finished novel and head for the coastal shoreline of South Florida.

An editor once commented that the melodrama with which I colored the storyline may “sell” in Latin America, but not in the U.S. of A. Well, I tempered it some but kept most of the vigor of adjectives. Like picante spicing bland foods, adjectives appropriate value to our mundane occurrences. After all, an artist must use the tools granted him, and these are drawn from his culture as much as circumstance. I am grateful for the Hispanic melodrama my mother seasoned my upbringing with; there were no easy pickings then, but plenty of violin tunes. Tell me if you think it would sell in America!

Why the title “Cry WaterColors”? A very good friend offered it as a comment on artistic genius; and because life is too short to waste on tuning the violin, rather than indulging in its tune.