FIRE TO FLY: My motto for FUTURES is "fire to fly" and I am often asked if I have always had that fire. As a child I lived to pretend. I was so timid that it was painful to speak, yet, by junior high I was in every school play and when the theatre went dark the audience disappeared and I was someone else. I am obsessed with every aspect of art and story. Beautiful works of art make me cry, I have many hundreds of books, I collect paper because I find the shades and textures excite me. I don't labor over a story, it burns and bubbles from my soul. So, yes. I have the fire.

My husband and I have had a motorcycle high performance shop for the past sixteen years. I learned about engines and grew to appreciate the beauty, the art involved in building these machines. My husband builds race engines for motorcycles and he works on all kinds of street bikes. He makes an art of it. Perfection in a machine is his thing and people come to him from many states around to have him do their motors, touch their metal! All things mechanical were Greek to me but now I love the sight, smell, the roar, of a finely tuned motor. Between us we have four daughters, a son and ten grandchildren. Fantastic!

I was working at our shop full time when I broke my leg -- after fifteen years in the car business (yup, I sold used cars, too!) I was working at our shop full time, the time 'home alone' prompted me to write my first novel. I wrote three complete novels (and many other things!) before I started the magazine.

Here's a quote about FUTURES from that very first issue three years ago. It says a lot about the magazine and plenty about me. "This is a prophetic magazine. It is about spunk, and guts, and never saying never." Molly Essau

In the Fall of 1998, I wrote a storyline for the first Alfred Hitchcock film, BLACKMAIL. My work was accepted and I was optioned by John Bennett, son of the original screenwriter Charles Bennett, to do the adaptation for film. Recently, Mr. Bennett asked if I'd like to do the novelization of that screenplay. I love the story, so perhaps...

I'm going to begin writing screenplays for the Spirit books soon. I am very attached to these characters... I hope you will soon feel the same...

Elsie Sanders life's journey begins-a travail of madness and pain. Her strength of character assists her on the slide in and out of the abyss, but this is a road riddled with twists--a psycho morph-like junket. Elsie, child-woman, was swallowed by her childhood. This girl-child is abused by parents, doctor, priest. No one to turn to, she and her friend become fused, as if brewed in the same pot. The carefully planned gruesome murder of her friend neatly slices her soul removing it from traditional civilized deportment. Elsie is hurled into the vortex of a group for victims of abuse. But now a piece is missing from the puzzle of her mind. She turns to drugs to quiet the screams inside and a second piece is lost. What follows is the plan--her plan to avenge each person in the group, but most of all, her friend. She has become an avenger.

This tale of psychological suspense deals with one woman's concern and search for justice in our contemporary society. Her life is filled with a circle of eclectic friends. Her days are orderly and mundane until she is faced with instances of injustice. At this point, she focuses utterly and relentlessly on retaliating for the helpless victim. Elsie is a strong woman whose unconventional methods circumvent the flaws of our justice system. She has within her the means and an overriding desire to right wrongs. She believes that if we are to survive as human beings, we must discover a way to find justice without losing our innocence. In each story, as in life, Elsie's character becomes more defined. She wants to do what others have not done, go where they do not dare, and with the help of her friends, and the Spirits of the world, she does exactly that.

This series of books contain scenes of graphic sex and violence, these are neither gratuitously presented nor sensationalized. These stories deal with the frustrations, fears and joys of life in this century. Although I write books of madness, I have other goals in mind. I believe in the wonder of diversity, and the building of community. The characters live and love together in the real world, have real problems and are not perfect. Elsie finds justice and maintains her innocence. She survives and helps to build, pull together, the community around her.

Here's the best advice I ever received and it's from my mom who died of cancer last September.

My mother tells a story of how, as one of ten children during the depression, her family would harvest whatever they could on their farm. Her mother would divide the food and ask her to help take it to those around them. My mother, who was always hungry in those days, would say, but mom, this is our food, we haven't enough, and grandma would say, but they have less. Mother taught me to give without regret. I have been told that I am good at bringing people together and I think this is the reason. I believe that if we live our lives as a unit, we never lose the strength to forge ahead. Does that make sense? That is the core of why I never give up. Someone is always there, giving strength.

My advice to writers?

Persevere. There is no such thing as failure...every lesson learned is part of your future.

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