That doesn’t really come as news to you, since you are obviously reading this on my website. But, I have to tell you, the road from having no need for a website to reaching this point was a long and winding one. You see, I have this stubborn streak in me that makes life difficult sometimes, but it also makes for a fascinating journey. Nothing ever comes easy, but lessons learned the hard way are often the best ones. That’s the moral of this story.

It all started nearly two years ago. As Carmen and I were preparing to move our lives from a Washington, DC suburb to our wonderful condo in a Costa Rican beach town, I had no idea what we were in for. I didn’t know that the move would require an absolute blizzard of paperwork, all of which would require special international verification to be considered valid. I also didn’t know that a worldwide pandemic was going to swoop in on our plans and make the move all but impossible. What I DID know was that once we pulled the trigger on this plan, there was no going back.

The next year of our lives was so tumultuous, that when we finally managed to make the move to Costa Rica, I felt I needed to write a book about what we had been through. The end result was my first book called Plan A Never Happens. I found the process to be cathartic. It was a way for me to unload all the stress that the previous year had crammed into my head.

Becoming an author has always seemed like the next logical step in my careers. I happily engaged in decades of work as a journalist and documentary film maker. I published a motorcycle magazine. I wrote for some internet outlets. But all of that was always factual information. Even that first book was a factual accounting of what we went through. But at least I was able to have some fun with the telling of that story. I found I could “editorialize” some humor into the telling of the true story.

At that point, it hit me. My calling as an author is to write true stories from a fictional perspective. The end result is a work of fiction, based on real events. By carefully crafting fact with fiction, you will never know where one begins and the other ends. Sometimes, I’m not even sure which is which.

That is the story behind my second book, Murdered For Nothing. It is based on a true crime spree that I covered as a young journalist in Rochester, New York. Again, I found personal relief in writing this book. The events of this story are but a small sampling of all the stuff that has been crammed into my memory over the many years I worked as a journalist. There will be more books to come before I will have cleaned my mental attic of all the trinkets I’ve been holding on to.