Me in a very happy mood.
August 27, 2018
It has been about three years since I first started messing around with the idea of writing a book, and a little over a year since I got really serious. It was during one of the almost-daily cocktail hours in our “good room” that I shared with my wife that I really needed not only to complete my novel, but to publish it as well. She gave me her complete support and we toasted to my new project. It has been a long journey, full of hard work, but also full of learning and growing. It has been fun.
I am from a family of readers and writers. Books, magazines, and newspapers were always around. Nowadays, Kindles and Nooks are around also. Growing up in the sixties and seventies in suburban New Jersey, I read most of the stuff that other kids did. I have always been drawn to action, adventure, and mystery, and would tear into whatever Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books I could get my hands on.
I was less than ten years old when my father took me to my first James Bond double-feature on the big screen, and that was a powerful event for me. I was so blown away by Bond and his fantastic adventures, that I must have demanded that my parents get me some of the original Ian Fleming books. I remember being more than a little bit confused and disappointed by those books at the time, because they were so sedate and boring relative to the sensational action of the movies, at least to a little kid. But I read some of them and tried to understand them, and that started me on a path of reading books that really should have been for older and more experienced readers.
Somewhere around there I acquired my first Agatha Christie mystery, though I don’t recall exactly how I got on to that. I do recall that it was “The ABC Murders”, featuring her great contribution to literature, Hercule Poirot. All this before I was ten years old!
I think it is safe to say that I was more well-read that most of the other kids in whatever grade I was in. I always did better in English class than I did in other areas, such as math and science. I never dreaded having to write something as much as many others did. Quality aside, I could generally sit down and just throw out a decent essay or short story. I never had any problems with those assignments to use words in a sentence, and would quickly churn out sentences that were probably silly as all heck, though did use the word correctly.
Going through junior high and then high school in the Lower Cape May Regional School District, I made regular contributions to the school paper. I would generally hand in some sort of outrageous murder mystery where numerous people had been violently killed. I still have several of those stories, and looking back at them now, I can hardly believe that they were published! If a teenager in school today were to present something like that, the FBI would certainly be alerted. But I got through it all and was awarded my diploma.
Fast forward more than thirty-five years, and after thirty of those years in the corporate world, here I am writing another lead-slinging story. Except that now, The Privilege of The Dead is an actual 100,000 word novel. I am working on several other ideas, including the possibility of a sequel or a series based on the characters in the novel.
For a large portion of my corporate life, I traveled quite a bit, taking more than 100 trips around the country. The places visited by the characters in my book are places that I have been to numerous times. (Well, I did invent the Buffalo Inn, in Western Minnesota.)
Block Island, off the coast of Rhode Island, in particular, has been an important part of my life. Several chapters containing key scenes take place there, and most of the places of business mentioned are real places. You can view a gallery of Block Island pictures elsewhere on this website. I also have a few scenes taking place in Cape May, New Jersey, which is the place that I generally consider my “home town”.
That’s about it for now. I will try to update this author site regularly. Please feel free to use the contact form if you like, and I will get back to you.
Thanks for visiting-
Miles
