My first mistake as a
professional writer...
I wasted no time messing up—my first day of my first real writing job after earning an MA in journalism. I landed at a rural newspaper too small to have yet made the digital leap. On my assigned desk was a manual typewriter and an oil can. Remnants of newsprint rolls were sliced into typing paper. Although the sheets were nearly twice as long as standard typing paper, with double line spacing many stories required multiple sheets. Rather than hand the desk editor an article comprised of loose pages, each successive sheet was glued to the one before it, forming one continuous page from dateline to -30-.
Unfortunately, I didn't know that procedure and coming from a
home where things were maintained and repaired rather than disposed of and replaced, I assumed the oil can contained oil rather than rubber cement for gluing articles together. And the only thing on my
desk with movable parts that might require oiling was... You guessed it.
Once I got past that sticky start... I became a pretty good reporter. Within a year I was working at a large West Coast daily and ever since, writing has been both my profession and avocation; my toil and my escape.
A history major since fourth grade, all my books—
from my best-selling true-crime chronicle, Dead Run,
to my novels—weave history into the story.
When I'm not writing or doing historical research,
I enjoy hiking among the high peaks of Colorado,
skiing, reading, playing pickleball and spending time
doing just about anything with my wife Lynda (except
gardening). I like cold-brew coffee and dark chocolate. (The unifying theme may be caffeine.) And while writing is kind of a lone-wolf pursuit, I'd love to
hear from you on any of those topics (not gardening).
