Notes from the Hibernation

PROFILES IN SERVICE launches this week

It’s been a wonderful period of hibernation, nearly three weeks clamped down by a two-foot snowfall that froze into place soon after the last flakes hit.

That first week, January 25, we spent five consecutive days shoveling what we could, to include clearing a 400 meter lane of track at a local high school.

The remaining days proved a period of productivity detailed below, though satisfaction in the work itself was reward enough.

At the end of this week we finally caught a terrific thaw, including a chance to uncover our patio furniture before snowmelt waterlogged the cushions. Yesterday hit a sunny 55 degrees, and light rain today beat back the mounds of snow piled on the corners all over town.

Falling Out

The spirit wasn’t in me to publish during this period, but now it’s time to rip off the band-aid and declare some excellent news.

Back in December, I had a falling out with the original publisher of my first nonfiction book, PROFILES IN SERVICE. The less said about it the better. Suffice it to say we had irreconcilable differences where grammar, art, and style are concerned.

Now I can announce that Arlington Hall Press has picked up where my previous publisher left off. They’ve been terrific to work with and the book should be available on Amazon this week.

No link for now, but I’ll share when it arrives.

Thriller on the Loose

The period also allowed me to tuck into revisions of a thriller I’ve been working on, an international crime and espionage caper set in West Africa. Think Le Carre’s The Constant Gardener meets James Elroy’s American Tabloid.

Crooked cops, corrupt spies, and drug-addled scam artists drive the plot of Powder Fish, set in a derelict West African state overrun by cocaine traffickers and badly governed by tribal politics.

The plot probes the moral ambiguity of Western intervention in the developing world even as it packs the fast-paced punches of a commercial blockbuster:

American aid worker Kerri Gold reconstructs the circumstances of her friend’s murder in a fictional West African country with the help of a local teen and U.S. embassy investigator Jim Fitch.

They learn that Charlie Winston, son of a prominent U.S. congressman, was killed for his role diverting drug profits to his rural community.

Gold can either revive Winston’s plan to help local fishermen and farmers with illicit cash from the sale of cocaine bundles washing ashore, or she can join a U.S. plot to install a government willing to rout organized crime.

Beta readers welcome if anyone wants to know how things turn out.

Democracy v. Olympics

Two great battles riveted me to the television in recent weeks. I dare say it’s been a pleasure to watch American democracy in action.

And the Olympics have been full of the usual thrills of victory and agonies of defeat.

But if I hear one more announcer describe the phenoms on my screen as “Among the best in the world,” one more time, I might have to fly to Milan and stuff a sock in someone’s mouth.

They’re Olympians. They are by definition among the best in the world.

Salinger, Easton Ellis, and What Comes Next

Been doing my share of reading, too. Most fascinating was to find myself reading 1994’s The Informers after sitting with 1951’s The Catcher in the Rye.

There’s something to the progress of disaffected narrative voices across the decades.

How will these same voices be transformed to meet 2026 and beyond?

Digital me. Digital you. Am I real? Just ask AI.

It’s a brave new future.

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