My mother often said that I had been vaccinated with a phonograph needle, and her friends would chuckle, then shake their heads in sympathy. I’ll let that go without comment. If you’re older, you’ll understand the metaphor. If not, you’ll figure it out if it really matters to you.
The fact is that I chattered a lot, told stories beginning at a very young age. I was a liar. It took time to convince everyone that I wasn’t lying, just fantasizing. Okay, I was lying. The lies became stories later. Writing came even later, much later.
     Inasmuch as honesty seems to be the theme of this essay, I didn’t have the discipline to be a writer which is why my catalog of novels is very small. Nor did I have the discipline to be an artist. I had some talent as an artist as well as a storyteller, but there too my lack of discipline stood in the way. I simply had too much imagination to pursue anything with success except for learning.
I have an insatiable appetite for knowledge. I want to know everything. As a child, my favorite pastime was lying on the floor with some random volume of the encyclopedia opened to a random page. If I had a purpose such as researching a school project, I may have chosen the volume with care but was soon distracted by all the other topics between the front cover and the object of my search. You can easily imagine how distracted I must be by the Internet.
     As you may have guessed, I lacked the discipline to be a successful scholar. I tormented teachers and professors in grade school, high school, college, and law school with questions they dismissed as irrelevant (which I often suspected was merely an excuse for their lack of an answer). And I refused to follow the herd. I was the maverick that teachers had to round up after my attention wandered off the trail they were blazing. I am the Reluctant Scholar I wrote of in a short, true story.
My other great love is adventure. An abusive father inspired my need to get out of the house as much as possible and adventures ensued. Scouting, at least a form of scouting little resembling today’s discredited organization, offered many excuses and opportunities. Sea Scouting in particular offered the greatest adventures. It also introduced me to men who would become surrogate fathers, providing me with acceptance into the community of men. 
     Indeed, Sea Scouting inspired my first taste of discipline and I applied myself to the art of piloting, seamanship, and small boat handling with an enthusiasm that ultimately led to my certification by the US Coast Guard as a licensed operator of small craft with passengers for hire, when I turned just 18.
     When just sixteen, one of my surrogate fathers offered me the adventure of a young man’s lifetime. He had purchased a yacht in Galveston, Texas, and offered to pay me to help him pilot it back to the Chesapeake Bay where I had been born and raised. There were to be stops in New Orleans and Havana, Cuba, before crossing to Florida and ​sailing the inland waterway north along the Atlantic Coast.
I purchased sailing guides and charts and began plotting our voyage. It wasn’t until I tallied the distances and times that I discovered the flaw in the dream. I would miss the first three months of my senior year of high school, and there was no way that I would be allowed, not with my academic history. That trip languished in my memory until I finally retired from my career as a computer consultant and inspired my first novel The Last Spy (originally published as Rebels on the Mountain). 
​     The Last Spy is not a fantasy of that missed adventure. It is, rather, a work of historical fiction recounting Fidel Castro’s successful revolution. My wife wanted me to write the story as though I had sailed to Cuba as a boy, but I wasn’t interested in revisiting the angst of youth. It was bad enough having lived it once. However, I was interested in exploring the story of Castro and his Fidelistas. As it happened, had I taken that trip, we would have arrived in Havana about four months prior to Fidel’s triumphal entry into the Cuban capital.
​     Obviously, lacking the discipline of an academic historian, I had to tell the tale from the point of view of a fictional character, Nick Andrews, a spy. Making Nick a spy was not a conscious choice. Indeed, I’d be hard put to explain it. However, it turned out to be the perfect choice for me and my story. Unlike agents provocateur, such as James Bond, Nick is an observer, there to report on the events rather than influence them. The role of spy fits both Nick and I like a glove. It’s comfortable, familiar. Having grown up in a dysfunctional home, I survived by fading out of view, observing without drawing attention to myself. It was a point of view that allowed me to learn while avoiding the consequences of participating. Spies must do the same. Indeed, to be discovered can bring disastrous consequences, such as the shooting down of the U2 spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers destroyed the nascent relationship that President Eisenhower was attempting to foster between the United States and the Soviet Union during the same period as Castro was fomenting rebellion in Cuba. 
     Shortly after Rebels on the Mountain was published, I began to realize that I had the potential of a series inserting Nick into major events of the Cold War; the Korean War, the Hungarian Revolution, and the Cuban Revolution. Fortunately, as it turns out, the publisher wasn’t able to drum up much distribution for Rebels on the Mountain giving me the chance to rewrite it as The Last Spy and make it the third in the Nick Andrews Spy Series.
Yes, a trilogy takes more discipline to craft than a single novel, but I have now published all three. A fourth, The (?) Spy will be written as soon as I complete the second of my two-year tour of duty as VFW Post Commander.
Until the first is published later in 2020, please enjoy my short stories available on this website. Also, my journals of my experiences at Infantry School (where I learned a modicum of discipline) and a tour of duty in Vietnam, are available free of charge on Smashwords.
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