Be advised: I am an award winning author. The first was a medal I received in high school. I was a finalist in a national essay competition I hadn't entered. My English teacher sent my essay in—when she pressed the dime-sized award into my palm I was dumbfounded. I threw it into a small wooden box with a bar along the bottom to lock it, on top of a stack of small-denomination (but colorful) foreign paper money my uncle had sent when in the military overseas, iron-on patches—one proving I'd attended "hunter's safety." Another for pedaling my dirt bike thirty miles for multiple sclerosis while wearing a straw cowboy hat and a denim jacket—a wineskin full of gatorade strapped across my chest, snake-bite kit deep in my jeans pocket. (It didn't say all of that on the patch of course—but I knew—and now you do.) The medal clanked around for years in that box, useless and hidden, against a silver dollar my dad had given me. A tiny totem of denial that what I really wanted to do … was WRITE. The second award? An apron with mushroom designs: an award for "best fungi haiku" written as an egg timer clicked on a table in a wine-soaked festival crowd. I don't wear the two together … the medal and the apron: I don't like to show off. I've been a nurse for 20 years, and bits of humor have allowed me, (and my patients) to better cope with pain, death, and terror. "You should write a book!" I heard, dozens of times. Here it is: http://amzn.to/1R8IS8I I hope you enjoy my first thriller: "Inhumanum" (Latin for brutal.) The sequel, "Made Men" will be available on Amazon in Fall of 2016. Cheers~ Bradley http://bradleyernst.com/ Visit me on Facebook here:http://on.fb.me/1SLrypl