To begin my life at the beginning of my life, I was born.

But let's begin before my birth....

One of my earliest memories is of sitting on the steps into my parents’ living room and listening to the authors in my dad’s writers group read aloud from their latest works.

My father, Dolph Sharp, was born in Long Island N.Y. Daddy made his living writing fiction for magazines like Colliers, The Saturday Evening Post and Women’s Day.

Shortly after he moved to L.A., one of his works, “The Tragedy in Jancie Brierman’s Life,” was published in The Best American Short Stories of 1948. Looking for literary companionship in this new city, he set out to start a writers’ group. Searching through the anthology's table of contents, he called all the writers living in Los Angeles.

Not long after, Ray Bradbury, Sanora Babb, Wilma Shore, Joseph Petracca, Elliott Grennard and Ben Maddow met, along with my father, each week at our home in the Hollywood Hills.

For over 30 years, they came to our house on Blair Drive. The house is built onto the hill. One enters on the top floor, and descends a few steps into the living room. Gathering around the coffee table, they would read their works aloud and comment on one another’s projects. There were drinks and smokes and laughter…always laughter.

These were always the best of times in our house. The group formed in the 1940s and lasted all the way to the late 1980s when my father became too ill to host. The group started and ended with him. Ray and my daddy were always each other’s biggest fans.

All these years later, Ray thought that the writers group worked so well and lasted so long because they were all so different. They were screenplay writers, architectural critics, magazine columnists, songwriters and scriptwriters. “There was no one stepping on anyone else’s feet,” Ray said.

My father died when I was fairly young, and I'm a late baby, but I remember those nights well. When I started writing, Ray was very supportive. Until his death last year, I'd read him my stories and he always gave me his candid comments and encouragement. He said, “Throw it up in the morning and clean it up in the afternoon!” And to this day I do.

My first book, Dirk Quigby's Guide to the Afterlife, (All you Need to Know to Choose the Right Heaven) came out in 2010. My second book, Real Conversations with Imaginary Friends, an anthology of short fiction came out in 2012, fiction.

That same year, my first book, "Dirk", was picked up by a publisher in Spain, so it’s in Spanish and they lisp when they read it.

I have another anthology coming out this year, Another Happy Ending, (so called, because, like life, my tales while funny, end unhappily) and a novella, The Card Game, about a card game between Chance, Fate, Destiny and Luck.

I'm currently working on my next novel Blood Prism.

Publishers want novels rather than short stories. Short stories are very easy to publish but you don't get a lot of money for them. With collections, well it's easy to publish collections with small presses, but it's hard to get big boys to look at them and I want the big boys.

What's Blood Prism about? Like life... like love.... it's complicated. If I had to boil it down to an elevator pitch and we were only going one floor, I would say Botany of Desire meets Interview with a Vampire meets Crash.

If I had the time to make it more thematic I would say it's a tale of mythology and the dispossessed. Characters from Greek, Native American, Chinese and European mythology are woven into the tale.