As you might have guessed by now, I write and publish the Talk Radio Mystery series featuring Jerry Jeremy and his pals. I make my home in Marin County, California just across the Golden Gate Bridge. I have lived in the Bay Area long enough to be a native San Franciscan, which out here is just about long enough to start getting junk mail. Like most of the natives, I started out someplace else—in my case, a bump in the road called New York City. Well…to be honest, before that, a real bump in the road in rural Michigan (Pop. 987).

When not plotting the occasional murder, I work in high-tech and have a few media companies with radio or internet TV on my resume.  I really got hooked on talk radio when I worked in Silicon Valley and commuted by car ninety minutes one way. (Okay, okay, it was ninety minutes the other way too.) Anyway, those radio shows made the time fly—even when traffic didn’t. My guy, Jerry Jeremy, is a light-hearted take on what one of those great talk show hosts might be like off the air—if he ran into a screwball crime caper.

Like a lot of folks—maybe even you—I have wanted to be a writer since I was a kid. Maybe like a real man’s man of a writer, like Hemingway or maybe Lee Childs, or a fabulous spinner of web-like plots, Agatha Christie for example. After all, it does seem better than working.

The drawback, of course, is having to actually write something. To put your bottom in a chair and let your fingers loose on a keyboard. Not to mention coming up with a few characters, some likable and some not. A plot too, like Dame Agatha. Voice, style, correct spelling and, well, as you can imagine, a few thousand other things I can’t think of right now.

Well, I have the writing down, having written some now. Some that I’m proud of and some that deserve to languish in a closed and locked drawer in my laptop. It’s taken some time and a lot of messing around to get here. I have tried pen and paper, really pad and pencil to make erasing a lot easier. Legal pads and letter-sized. At one point in time, I was commuting about ninety minutes one way to my day job. What better time to write?

Of course, nowadays texting while driving is frowned upon, but creative writing on the freeway was always a little on the iffy side. Ah ha! The pocket-sized tape recorder! I could dictate while I played in traffic. Well, that didn’t work too well. I just couldn’t think about a cast of characters and what they were up to while cursing out my fellow man.

If I was ever to get a damn’ book done, I needed to change jobs. I had heard of guys who became night watchmen so they could write it out between rounds around the warehouse. Doris, bless her heart, nixed that, Doris being my one and only.

So I changed jobs.

But since a career in the security industry wasn’t quite right—security guards getting paid only slightly more than full time writers. I stuck with a career in the information technology arena to make ends meet.

How did this help my writing?

As they say in real estate, location, location, location. I got hired on to a company with offices right in downtown San Francisco. As any local knows, you’d have to be crazy to commute by car to the City. A family of four could live on what they charge for parking, let alone the tolls.

From north of the City, where I live, the best commute is by boat.

The commuter ferry from Marin County to the Ferry Building right at the foot of Market Street, not far from Jerry Jeremy’s KPMT radio station, is the only way to go. And so I do.

I got myself a laptop and a good spot to work on the Golden Gate ferry (they have great little work tables for just such needs) and have been writing both going and coming ever since. Talk radio still keeps me company, only this time the words are all mine even if I put them in someone else’s mouth. So just like the guys on the radio say, stay tuned!