Hi. Yeah, I know. It’s been a long time since my last post. It was going to be good 2020, with lots of great stuff happening both at work and personally. I was working on a business communications book proposal process, and Jill and I were planning on going to Prague for a business/personal combo trip. (I visited Prague nearly twenty years ago and was really looking forward to going back.) There was also talk of taking Nick to California for a vacation. I was planning on blogging around all of it.
The pandemic had other plans, of course. And some serious cultural dialogues around endemic racism in law enforcement and the justice system that impacted all of our social media and publication activities.
So no traveling. Although we did manage to get to the New Jersey shore a couple of times, and Jill and I took a few little trips close to home, including a little river cruise on the Hudson.
Nick ended up participating in an invitation-only start-up incubator program for his product idea that began, modestly enough, as a project in a design lab at NJIT. His product, which I won’t talk about but can say it involves self-training for beginning lacrosse players, has genuine market viability and it is likely he’ll turn it into a product when he can come up for air from his studies.
Jill meanwhile decided to return for her master’s in organizational communication and great for her! She’s begun her first semester as a grad student and it is going well.
As for me, I changed my mind about the comms book. I’ll still be publishing my ideas but under a different… uhm… circumstance. More on that later.
Instead I wrote a novel.
I have been planning on a return to fiction writing for a long time. Back when I was in my early thirties I had an agent and had written a novel that, according my agent, came within a hair’s breadth of being sold to Farrar Straus & Giroux. But it was a time when I had way too many things going on. I was still a media artist, and showing my work extensively including a tour throughout the United States at universities, galleries, and film societies. I had a business communication business with several major northern California clients. I was curating art and film exhibitions. I was even consulting on political races. I just didn’t feel that I had the luxury of devoting time to the solitary pursuit of being a novelist, certainly not at the level of commitment required to be successful. I let it drop.
So for me this is not a “new” pursuit, more like dealing with unfinished business. The novel, which is in the thriller/crime/suspense arena, is conceived as the first of a multi-book arc. There will be a lot more to come about this, but right now I’ve begun the query process with agents because I want to publish through traditional methods.
I will try to keep up on the blog posting. Expect shorter posts. I will also be changing the design of this website to better serve my needs, so don’t be shocked.
Anyway, more to come.