Ah, so my well-paid staff of advance men has done its filthy work...welcome, Donna.

And congrats on busting into the big time. Not mention making a living at scribbling. Huzzah!

Tier II is a spin-off - a bastard daughter, if you will - of the mega-group TWG (The Writing Group). Not to honk my own rusty, hell-bent trumpet but I founded that group, TeeBeeDee's very first, on August 1, 2007.

This group - quiet yet combustible, capable of the occasional literary solar flare, stubbornly set in its writerly ways - is devoted to those fearless enough to hang their writing on the line for comment.

We are respectful, eager, mostly human (although some of us might better be described as "feral humans").

And so again: welcome. Please make yourself at home.

- akabukowski

Welcome aboard. Writing is the loneliest vocation but it is a self-imposed loneliness. Writers seem to crave the company of other writers - people who understand the inner chaos and conflict needed to produce the outer finished and serene product. It is in the realm of the appreciation for the unturned phrase, the solemnity of the unused word, the frustration of the unfulfilled dream that writers meet to share their fulfilled and unfulfilled ambitions.

Suggestions of others, like the stimuli of the outside world fill the kettle that boils within us and from which we extract the essenses we need to continue writing.

If you understood that, you are way ahead of me. I just write it; I never try to justify it!

Again, welcome; like a mandala, I choose to end where I began and leave to others the interpretation of the journey.