When I bought this domain, I had intended it to be a place to host a professional portfolio — I have worked for over twenty years in Corporate Learning and/or Higher Education, either as a Lecturer, Instructional Designer, or ersatz Project Manager. It may still end up being a portfolio, though not yet. Instead, it will serve primarily as an outlet for something I was not doing for those same twenty years.

While I’d never say I’m grateful for the pandemic, I can’t discount the fact that it forced me to confront my bewildering, unprofessional job and ultimately choose something else. In my case, that something else was writing in general, and crime/noir/hardboiled fiction in particular. This didn’t really come from nowhere, though, as in my twenties I got as far as an MFA in poetry and no further. Truthfully, I didn’t even get that far, as I stopped writing poetry 6 months before I defended my thesis and then hoped that what I had already written was enough to get me over the finish line. I completely fell out of love with writing for a long time, but maintained my love of reading.

What this site looks like over the next year, or 2 years, or 5 years, is anyone’s guess. My only plan is to use it as a creative outlet to document, support, and perhaps promote whatever comes from my decision to start taking crime/noir writing seriously. It might be linking to where I have things published elsewhere, it may be collecting things that I self-publish, it may be sharing drafts, or something else entirely. Additionally, I’d also like to write about other things I care about, such as baseball, learning & development, and philosophy.

I am also handling all HTML/CSS myself, and I am out of practice. Visual layout will likely change frequently until I settle on how I want this to look and function.