Philip Abbondanza is a college graduate with a BA degree in Anthropology, with minors in Greek and Roman Classics from CUNY Brooklyn College, a retired Certified Respiratory Thera-pist and author of several fiction books, including The Sheepshead Bay Horror, The Roots of Happiness, several science fiction short stories, the sci-fi novella Sea Story, and the three books of The China Trilogy-White Lily, China Sword, and China Storm. He had also been a stringer for the Respiratory Therapy paper Respiratory Advance.
He is also a United States Air Force veteran. He served 13 years as a substitute teacher for the Florida Lee County Board of Education and was a senior member of the Dolphin Squadron of the Civilian Air Patrol.
What brought him to write what he calls his magnum opus was the interpretation of a dream segment that inspired him to write the story. “I knew I had a book in me someplace, but I didn’t quite know what it would be until I started to write it. I knew that what I dreamt would be part of it. Then, once I started to write, I couldn’t stop; my muse had complete control. It was like my hand had a mind of its own, so I let it write whatever it wanted. My sources were drawn from materials that I had been exposed to all my life, some of them gleaned from stories from my family who served in WWII, some from myriad reading and movies, some from the headlines of the 50s, 60s, and 70s that helped with my second and third book, China Sword and China Storm.
