The title Story Alchemy isn't a metaphor. It's the real deal. Ideas for stories, the prima materia of the story alchemist, are gifts. They are provocations from the unconscious, lures. The unconscious lies in wait, stalking you with a story aimed directly at your heart. Even when you get an idea from the outside world, it has resonated with something locked away inside your Unconscious. A story has its own ego. It wants to be told. Once the idea has come to you, and it comes of its own volition, you must consciously establish contact with the psychic energy that contains the story. It takes a collaboration between Consciousness and the Unconscious to bring the words across. We know certain things about stories that will aid us in the telling. Story is a particular form of psychic energy to which details cling, a unity of psychic energy. That energy has the same shape, the same form, but the details are different, so different that we hardly recognize the form from one story to another. Cinderella is such a story that has been told many times under different guises throughout the centuries. You must find your stories, those meant for you alone. To tell them, your awareness must cross the psychic threshold, the Iris of Time, and enter the Imaginarium. Story Alchemy unveils the alchemical processes involved in that divine art, the Philosopher's Stone of storytelling.

In 480 BC, fifteen-year-old Melaina's biggest worry, she thinks, is wishing to follow Artemis and remain virgin when her mother and grandfather want her to marry and became a priestess. But when the Persians invade, the gods themselves have plans for Melaina, including carrying a divine child and divining for the Greek fleet in a battle to determine the salvation or ruin of all Greece.

The Escape of Bobby Ray Hammer is a second generation "Grapes of Wrath" novel in that Bobby's parents migrated to California during the 1930s, the "Dust Bowl" days. Bobby is just entering his senior year in high school and eager to graduate and go on to college to get out of his rural farming community; however, he realizes that he must resolve family problems that originated, he believes, with the death of his older brother before he can fulfill his dream. Little does he realize the trail of misery he will cause as he uncovers the family secrets that led to his brother's death.

The Mysteries, A Novel of Ancient Eleusis is a trilogy set in ancient Greece at the time of the Persian invasion. Historians constantly remind us that in 480 BC, when the great Persian Empire invaded Greece, King Xerxes planned to expand his dominion to the Atlantic Ocean, and if Greece hadn't repulsed the invasion, Western Civilization, together with its democratic institutions, would not exist. Today we would be Oriental. Much has been written about the invasion, but little concerning heroic women. According to Herodotus, feminine influence in the form of the goddess Demeter was a deciding factor in the famous battles of Salamis, Plataea, and Mykale. Thus, the female spirit played an unheralded role in the salvation of democracy. The Dadouchos Volume 2 of The Mysteries, concerns this feminine influence as personified by the priestess of Demeter and her daughter. They represent the essence of the great Mysteries of Eleusis, the spiritual underpinning of the ancient Greek religion.

When David Sheppard was 20, he considered a literary life, beginning with an extensive trip to Greece. But a potentially deadly encounter with his father derailed these plans, and instead, Sheppard pursued a thirty-year career in aerospace, on the way marrying and fathering two children. Now, 32 years later, he fulfills his life-long literary dream on a three-month solo odyssey through Greece, a journey that quickly becomes a quest to understand his past. In the process of relating his own life stories to those of ancient Greek myth, Sheppard succeeds in creating his own personal mythology, with the goal of settling a complicated father-son relationship, a divorce from his wife of 18 years, and the disappearance of his only daughter. Can he survive the search within while traveling this ancient land of murder and suicide? Travel with the author through this internal, mythic landscape as he uncovers startling revelations about his own life as a particular case of the human condition.

Novelsmithing, The Structural Foundation of Plot, Character, and Narration provides the beginning novelist, or perhaps even the experienced novelist who has lost his way, with a discussion of the underlying structure and methods of novel writing. Nowhere else can the aspiring author learn the skills necessary to achieve the organic unity of the novelist's divine trinity: character, conflict and theme, so necessary to a fine work of literature. He will also learn the art of narration, how to lock the conflict, resolve the conflict, all the while, laying out the integral chapter structure. This approach to novel writing is not about the art of creative writing. It's about the craft, the novelsmithing, of making a story into a novel. The aspiring screenwriter will also find most of the chapters useful. Completing the first nine chapters of Novelsmithing will provide the author with a rough draft for his novel.