Nine months ago, before my mother passed away, before this horror show (my awareness of my parents' money being stolen right out from under everyone's noses) began, if anyone had suggested to me just how easy it is to steal from the elderly and just how often it happens --...

Hollywood icon Mickey Rooney is to be the special guest star in a new feature-length documentary film which examines the financial exploitation of senior citizens, the staggering financial cost and the incalculable human cost.

Elder exploitation is among the safest and most lucrative criminal enterprises in the world, being the...

A few months ago, had someone asked me what I'd have considered to be the worst event in a person's life, I'd have said, without hesitation, the loss of a loved one. I have since reconsidered. Learning too late (shortly after my 90-year-old mother's death) that my parents were the...

A light snow was falling as my producers and I drove 3 ½ hours to an abandoned hotel in an aging, one-horse town which put me in mind of a 1950's Sears catalogue, miles and miles away from just about everything. When Justin Morales (Co-Executive Producer and President of production...

On September 11th, 2010, I was vegging out in my living room for a few minutes, taking a break from the sad memories of the day and the intensity of my Lodestarre trilogy when, in a sudden burst of inspiration, I grabbed my pad and pen and wrote a silly...

It's the holiday season, that time of the year when everyone's thinking about gifts. Me, too -- but in a slightly different way this year. I've been thinking about this gift I've been given: my ability to write. And an even greater gift: the fact that my words actually got...

After stringing together 170,000 words, formatting them into a coherent document and then watching in awe as my publisher transformed that document into what eventually became my very first novel, I found myself in the unenviable position of having to compose -- oh no!!! -- the dreaded synopsis!
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When I was fifteen, my friend's father passed away. Upon entering her house, I recall being told that both she and her grieving mother were "indisposed" because the doctor (those were the days when doctors still made house calls) had "given them a little something to calm them down." I...