I think of my writing career as a sprawling used car lot selling every kind of vehicle imaginable - from cratering clunkers to ho-hum practical sedans to gleaming luxury cars, and including oddities (like the old three-wheel Isetta) that just make you laugh. Surveying what's in the lot, I feel pleasure, excitement, shame and dread. Some of the "cars" I've sold have been very good, others merely utilitarian. A few had their share of dings, and some had no wheels at all.

Almost everything I've undertaken was something new and different. I wrote original "Down East" comedy for humorist Marshall Dodge (of "Bert and I" fame) for radio and TV. I wrote an interactive mystery anthology special for PBS, which was followed by a serialized, competitive, mysteries-by-mail enterprise that landed a guest spot on The Today Show but ultimately crashed and burned. There was a time I was writing a sock puppet TV series for preschoolers in the morning and a marketing video for EMC Corp. in the afternoon. I became a mini-expert on Boston's Coconut Grove fire of 1942 and the Wall Street Crash of 1929, having written docudramas about both for Home Box Office. I've worked for a small town newspaper, edited a national journal for independent school teachers, and written critical pieces about modern dance and experimental visual arts for television. For several years I was writing musical plays for young adults and an adult one-act, all produced, but I failed completely at peddling screenplays in Hollywood. All of my novels, except one, met the same fate, though there have been too many close calls with major publishers to mention.

The exception was The Very Bad Thing, bought by Viking Penguin in 1989 based on two chapters and an outline - thanks to the work of my very fine agent, Meg Ruley. Good reviews, modest sales, and scary karma that the book sold so easily. Every novel since then - far better work, I believe - never quite made it, despite having some of New York's best agents working on my behalf. And so, in time, my choice to take the self-publishing route with Place and Calling Out Your Name.

The day job happens through Ned White, Inc. - some twenty-five years of video scriptwriting for corporations and organizations: marketing and promotion, training, business entertainment, product launches and the like. Again, thankfully, almost every project is new and different. In just a day or two, I need to become an expert on stereolithography, cross-training shoes, or how to move a data center. All of it's a fun ride. Recently, the company has taken on two new pursuits - stock and portrait photography, and constructing crossword puzzles for The New York Times.

My lifelong hunger for change has eased considerably, now that I'm happily settled with my wife Carla here in Decatur, Georgia. We're both avid photographers, musicians, gardeners, two-wheelers, travelers, cooks. My kids are grown and happy, living in the Northeast and doing just what they want to do - social work (Molly), musical theater and children's theater (Amy), and custom event production, art and poetry (Sam).

My photography website is here. I'd enjoy having you take a look.

Carla's photography site is here. She'd enjoy having you take a look.

My blog gets updated from time to time. It's mostly about my books, crossword puzzles, and photography, but politics pops in now and again.