This series was always planned to be a grand story, consisting of many separate verses that would all come together in one final epic work.

Needless to say, it didn't quite happen that way. I have a wonderful affection for the Wishes series, and to this day there remains a "lost" poem in the series. I wrote a fourth poem in the series and it was great. This was back in the days of no portable computers—well, I didn't have one anyway. So I typed it up on my trusty Brother typewriter, congratulated myself on a work well written, and then promptly lost it.

The three that remain are probably the most eclectic works I've written. They are disjointed and sometimes don't appear to make a whole lot of sense, but there was always going to be this really epic finish that would tie everything together. I envisioned 100 or so individual Wishes poems, followed by a grand Divine Comedy like finale where everybody reading would just drop the book spontaneously and stand to applaud me. But I can live with the three that are here in this collection. They were all written in the basement (i.e. writer's studio) in the house I grew up in.

Death and the afterlife were fascinating subjects to me at the time that most of these poems were written. I suppose that most adolescent boys go through the same phase but express it differently. Whereas one will dress all in black and scream the lyrics of his favorite death-metal band, another may choose to retreat into himself and write, perhaps about loneliness, perhaps about solitude, or perhaps even about death itself.

The Wishes series in particular was to be my epic series; it would touch on all aspects of life, spirituality, death, the afterlife, and everything in between. I'm still not sure where I got off track, but I really did have grand plans for these wonderful stanzas. The first couplet was inspired by a relationship I was having at the time. I guess it would be fair to say that it was a "forbidden" relationship in that this particular girl was dating another fellow at the time of our rendezvous. There was a lot of passion between us and even though I knew that what I was doing may not be in my bets interest, I couldn't resist the temptation that was placed before me. That's what makes this little gem another Apple in my own personal Eden.

I tried to add a little comedy to the third installment in the series. I didn't start this one with the intention of making it comedic, but that's the direction it wanted to take. My poems have lives of their own, and sometimes they take me in directions that I don't even want to go in. I have to trust in them though, because sometimes they know much better than I, what it is that I really want to say.

Most of my writing is like that I suppose. I always read these stories about how such-and-such an author always has his or her work mapped out ahead of time, and they always know exactly what they want to say and exactly how they are going to say it. I, on the other hand, never know what it is I'm going to say at any given time I sit down at the computer. I stare, and listen to Beethoven, and eventually something comes to me, so I write. If it's good I'll keep going, if not‡I'll still keep going because writing shit is still better than writing nothing. I'd rather see a page filled up with ridiculous tripe than have that piercing white demon staring back at me for hours.

A lot of the works that found their way into this book were written that way, and I know of no other way that works quite as well for me. I think of it as an adventure, I mean I know that the reader will be surprised by how it turns out because 99% of the time I don't even know how it's going to end! I like to keep myself in suspense while I'm writing, it's all part of the fun and part of the joy for me, and I wouldn't want it any other way.

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