Emotional, physical, and spiritual estrangement and ontological and religious doubt inform my personality, my thoughts, and my characters, which are, more often than not, masks for my own being and my being in the world - a world that frightens me insofar as I don't understand it.

I do seem to favor a deathbed confession as the occasion for my dramatic monologues.

My fondness for extended monologue might have been encouraged by two decades of writing stage and radio dramas.

For me, fiction's great gift - to writer and reader, alike - is freedom.

The persona in my stories may be truer to my "real" self than any alleged objective, factual "I" that I could replicate for the purposes of storytelling.

As a practical matter, I like the dramatic monologue for its compelling intimacy. To be inside one's character, to register his or her every vagrant thought, emotion, and response - the first-person viewpoint grants this privilege and immediacy.

I don't know about ground rules; but I create the world that arrives with the characters or situation or voice in my head that instigates the piece, whatever form it may take.