About
It all started when…
My first memories of being fascinated by words and writing were in eighth grade, in Mr. Anderson’s english class. The thing I remember most is diagraming sentences. I found it fascinating how one could construct a sentence in an almost infinite number of ways, moving dependent clauses, adding or removing punctuation, adding or removing a modifier, rearranging subjects and objects and predicates. It was like a chess match: there were many different moves one could make when putting pen to paper that could lead to “winning.” It was exciting, and freeing: the possibilities!
That fascination led to a life as a writer. First as an associate editor at several business trade magazines, then as editor-in-chief of an international physics magazine I founded at age 30. From there I went on to be the senior travel editor at Skiing Magazine, where I basically got paid to fly around the world and go skiing, when I wasn’t chained to my desk in Manhattan writing on deadline. Not a bad gig, but the pressures of being on the road half the year while raising a young family got to be too much, so I became a freelance writer, with clients as diverse as NBC Sports, Outside Magazine, AOL, The Los Angeles Times and various magazines owned byTime Inc.
From there it was an easy transition into the world of advertising, first as a copywriter, then as a marketing consultant, with a broad portfolio of clients such as ESPN, Lavazza Coffee and the American Museum of Natural History. Along the way I wrote magazine articles, newspaper articles, radio spots, film reviews, TV treatments, websites, social media posts and full-page ads that ran in such media powerhouses as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today.
Finally, I left that world behind so I could concentrate on my own work, publishing my first book, Passage to Nirvana, in 2010. (All five-star reviews in Amazon, and not from my mother and her friends. Whoo-hoo!) There are other books in the pipeline, coming soon. Like many book authors, I support myself in ways other than writing (I found being a freelance writer sucked up all my creative juices, leaving little for my own work). For the past ten years I have worked as a yacht captain, following in the tradition of writers who have gone to sea to earn a living: Jack London, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville and others.
