Books have always been my best friends. So when Santa brought me a toy printing press one year, my young imagination soared! I was going to become a printer! A publisher! A famous author! Why not? I could be anything I wanted to be -- my daddy said so! But there were a lot of things on the horizon my daddy just didn't know.

The route my life took from a simple Kansas childhood, to becoming an author and publisher in New York, was far from being a straight shot into success. I don't suppose I've ever done anything the easy way in my whole life. But seven years in the Arizona desert along the way? Years that found me divorced, then widowed, then living in the hostile desert alone, trying to earn my keep by typing papers for college students? Money troubles and aging fingers soon couldn't keep up the pace, and I crash-landed into the front door of the welfare office -- unable to work, no current skills to get a job -- my dreams going up in the smoke of the scorching desert sun. Where was my printing press now? I hid my dream away in the far corners of my mind. And wished I could hide myself away, too.

Well, that desert sun does strange things to people's minds, I'm here to tell you! Because, while I was hiding out, some fellow "desert rats" took the notion to befriend me. They simply wouldn't let me off the hook! I was going to make it, or else! So, with their help, encouragement, and sometimes just plain yelling at me, I found myself going back to school and earning a BA degree, at the age of nearly 50.

I sold the old car, and got just enough money out of it for a bus ticket East...and a laptop computer. No groceries, no wheels, no cash. But hey! -- with a laptop and a cat, I could go anywhere, do anything! I headed for New York, writing all the way. Filling up disk after disk with ideas, thoughts, hopes, even a few fledgling dreams.

I settled in upstate New York, and found a job managing a self-storage facility. The job came complete with an apartment, a car, salary, lots of free time...and a Pentium computer. Not a bad gig for an aspiring writer, eh? Then it got even better, the day the boss spoke the magic words: "Why don't you get us on the Internet?" The very next day, my cyberlife began.

The toy printing press had kindled the desire to put words into print. The laptop had brought me the wonder of word processing. Now the Internet brought me into the almost surreal atmosphere of worldwide communication. My world began to grow; my outlook on life began to grow; my writing skills, grow. And soon, my ambitions followed suit. This global society...I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted in! As a writer? A publisher? Some other business aspect of the thing? I didn't know. Lots of likely ideas came to mind. But the pathway that actually led me into my dreams took me completely by surprise.

In the process of corresponding with one particular penpal, something else other than mere friendship started to grow. Within weeks, my friend and I realized that we were, in fact, becoming very deeply in love with one another. There we were, two old widowed people, a couple of thousand miles apart, he selling carpet for a living, me running a warehouse -- both falling prey to cupid's arrow, via cyberspace! I was astonished.

Our cyber-love proved to be only the beginning of great new things for me. One day I got the idea that maybe there were other folks in the over-50 crowd who would be inspired by our cyber-romance. So I made our love story into a book, and set up a publishing company to market it -- via the Internet, of course. And, voila! The dream I've nurtured secretly since childhood is now coming to fruition! My first book will be printed and ready to market by summer, future volumes following hard on its heels. I am now both the publisher I've always wanted to be, and the author I have become.

So, if your surfing leads you to a book titled "Dating.Com: The Diary of an Internet Romance" -- buy it! Because now, you know how the book came to be. It came about because cyberspace is a wonderful place for love and dreams to grow. I hope your dreams are blossoming there, also.