1996

Angel Love is an anthology with the theme of?.......angels, of course.   Frankly, I rarely mention this anthology.  Why?  Because I've never met anyone who read it. 

But the story behind the story has always fascinated me. 

I was trying, desperately, to come up with a story idea.  I couldn't think of a scenario in which an angel could be considered a hero. I mean, an angel is dead, right?  (Little did I know that I would face a similar challenge with vampires later.)

That night, I dreamed of a scene in Pompeii, and a man who had lived a life of hedonism.   Before he died, however, he helped hundreds of people escape Pompeii as it was being destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.  I woke up, went to my computer, and wrote the story as I dreamed it.  Frankly, I loved it.

One day, about a year after the anthology was published, I was thumbing through a book on angels, thinking that I wish I had had the book as an inspiration when I'd needed it.   I stopped and stared when I came to one image.  It was a lithograph of a mural found at Pompeii.  A picture of an angel. Too weird.  

I bought the book, had the lithograph framed.  It sits on my bookshelf as a reminder that things happen that are sometimes unexplained.  Or that angels really exist.  

Click here to see a picture of my ancient angel