In the beginning

I didn’t set out to write a novel but sometimes fate intervenes.

It was 2018, well before Covid was in the wind, and I was running my own media consulting business when, by chance, I ran into an old friend in the parking lot of the local pharmacy. After catching up on our families, he asked, out of the blue, if I had ever been involved in writing a book. I told him I had not, but that over the years, I had written long-form magazine pieces and thought that was a natural stepping stone to book-length projects. In his earlier life my friend was an inventor of board games and he wanted to publish an autobiography about his experience. It’s a helluva tale and I told him I’d be happy to lend a hand if he thought I could help.

A couple weeks passed before my friend called and we started what would become an ongoing conversation about the story he wanted to write, how to structure a book and his goals for the autobiography. My friend has a heart of gold but his train of thought doesn’t always run in a straight line and our talks often took a circuitous route as he tried to sort out how best to proceed. Then one day he called and said that he had decided to partner with a ghost-writing firm in New York to shepherd the project. I wished him well and offered to be a sounding board if he ever needed one.

I wasn’t disappointed in his decision. How could I be? The book was about his experience, not mine, though, in that instant, I saw my budding dreams of becoming an author — albeit an anonymous one — vanish.

But then I had a thought: What if? What if I took the time and energy I had been devoting to my media business, freelance writing and consulting and instead channeled it into writing full-time for myself. What could I accomplish? I figured I’d know that answer in six months, maybe less. Either I was cut out to be an author or I wasn’t.

Forty-eight months later, I have completed four novels, four short stories and have loosely sketched the outline for two other books. Along the way, I landed a well-known agent, found a publisher, got waylaid by the pandemic and watched the book publishing industry get upended by the twin forces of a locked-down economy and the social justice movement.

Strangely enough it all started, not with a grand plan, but a chance encounter in the parking lot of a Rite Aid on a midsummer’s afternoon with an old friend that I hadn’t seen in the better part of a year.

And oh, by the way, my friend published his book. It’s called Game Changer. It’s about how he created Pictionary, one of the World’s most-popular board games. Like I said, it’s a helluva tale.