Ten Years On

About ten years ago a lot of things began happening for me. Going into the winter of 2007 I could look back at the last year or two and feel things coming on. My first novel, A Line Through the Desert was finished. I'd had a half dozen articles in print, including the lead cover story in S&T on Hastings and a few months later, Marlboro.

This was also the time, and I remember the next six months or so vividly, that I took on Mr. Mom duty. That's right, I was the stay at home dad taking care of our newborn while Mom worked. It was a cold winter, here in northern New Jersey, and we were stuck inside till about April, more like May really as in this part of the country April is gray and wet.

I learned the job and was lucky. Our oldest was a baby that slept form 7 to 7 after a few months. The first time she slept all the way through the night Mrs Stroock and I thought she was dead. But  the time she was awake, man it was tough. She was a hard baby, I realized later when we had our second, who just sat in my arms and spit up on me every five minutes or so. The oldest needed to be entertained constantly, and it was not until the winter of 2009 that I actually found something she would sit and watch without me, Monsters Inc it turned out.

Anyhoo, during naps I wrote. This was the time when I plowed through maybe a dozen magazine articles. These included William's conquest of England, the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia that year, Operation Defensive Shield, the Hezbollah War, the New Iraqi Army, etc. etc... I wouldn't start writing fiction seriously again till 2011, though I cranked out a short story from time to time. Some of these can be read in To Defend the Earth.

Well the oldest is ten and tween in all its glory and I have eight, soon to be nine, novels out.

Wonder what happens the next ten years.