I always dreamed of being a great writer and stories and plots seemed to come to me but I could never pull them onto paper as they appeared in my mind. Writers write and I never did write on a consistent enough basis to generate more than a number of short stories. I would like to believe that if I focused I would have been a great writer. In 1994 I began an honest push to be a writer. My family was living in Michigan and I was living in South Dakota and for six months I wrote every day. I was staying the Alex Johnson Hotel in Rapid City which is a very old hotel where six sitting Presidents stayed while visiting the area. As you walk into the Lobby the bricks you step on are all original and some have Native American symbols imbedded in them. One of those symbols looks like a Swastika. It's actually an ancient symbol that means the "four sacred corners of the earth" and was adopted by the Native Americans a couple hundred years ago. That same symbol is in a chandelier made of war spears. I lived in that hotel through the winter of 94’ and most nights I seemed to be its only tenant and had the full run of the hotel. I’ll never forget one evening coming back late to my room I heard the sound of a violin resonating down the halls of the hotel; that part of me that was infatuated with the hotel wanted to believe it was an apparition so I never asked at the desk who would be playing a violin late into the evening. The Bad Lands of South Dakota where the inspiration for a number of my stories and the Black Hills where ominous and beautiful and along with the Lakota culture made my imagination flow. If it was up to me I’ll go back and live in the Black Hills. I remember sending a number of these short stories out to editors and getting back form rejection letters. But there was one kind soul of an editor that rejected my story and sent along a personal note along with recommendations to improve the story. I saved that rejection slip as one of my greatest tre