It was 20 Years ago Today...

...That we received a much anticipated morning phone call. Our sister had given birth, and delivered unto the family a baby girl, Hannah, the first of the new generation of Stroocks. Hannah is named after our paternal grandmother, the afore mentioned southern lady from Louisiana. And so the dynamics of the fami de Stroock changed irrevocably.

It was a different life then. We lived five minutes outside of DC, off Route-7 or Lee Street (just to link things to current events). We spent three hours a day on Route-7 in our beat up '94 Saturn SC-1. Everyday we were passed by computer nerds driving their sportscars to one of the internet startups that dotted Northern Virginia.

We were writing direct mail fundraising letters for a living, not very well we suppose, as we'd be fired that July, just before the grand family trip to Hawaii, Brady Bunch style. It'd be another year before we tried writing seriously, when we were going back to school on-line, on a dial up. In late 2001 the idea for A Line Through the Desert popped into our head. Still in 2000 we were playing around with writing, a bit.

We guess we've been writing for 20 years now.