A few years ago I connected with mystery writer SJ Rozan on social media, and I had the pleasure of meeting her in person at a writer’s conference last summer. She recently expressed her disdain for the word “journey” as a description of one’s career path or life story. She’s not wrong. I’m partial to “ride,” which suggests a car or train whose wheels could come off at any moment. It may sound perilous and uncertain, but the writing life is often thus.
I got on the ride forty years ago this week.
It started with a feature article in the December 9, 1985, edition of The Akron Beacon Journal. The piece was called “Mark Twain Almost Called Cleveland Home.” It was about the iconic American author and his new wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens, and their search for a place to live after their wedding in 1870. (As the headline suggested, Cleveland was on the list, but the couple ultimately decided on Buffalo – then Elmira, New York, and finally settled in Hartford, Connecticut.)
One of the names in the byline was Ken Myers. The other was John Bruening.
Ken was a freelance writer at the time, and a journalism teacher at the small Jesuit college where I earned my bachelor’s degree in communications. He’d been covering the high-profile John Demjanjuk trial for a couple years, and his work was appearing in newspapers and magazines all over the country if not the world.
I was six months away from graduation, and badly in need of a mentor and a sense of direction. Only a few years out of college himself, Ken was the first person I’d ever met who was actually making a living as a writer, and he graciously took me under his wing. I honestly don’t remember exactly how we divided up the research, reporting and writing of the Mark Twain story, but the result was a byline in one of the most prominent dailies in Ohio.
It was a small bit of leverage, a wedge to help me get a foot in the door somewhere – anywhere – when the job search would get into high gear in a few months. The way forward was far from clear, but it was a start.
The first stop after graduation was a chain of county-wide suburban weekly newspapers. When I interviewed for the job in the fall of 1986, the editor asked me one of his standard questions: Do you consider yourself a better reporter or a better writer? My experience as a reporter at the time was almost nonexistent, so the answer was a no-brainer.
The editor’s name was Arnie Rosenberg. Up until then, he had only hired candidates with journalism degrees, but he took a chance on me (and yeah, the Beacon Journal clip helped). To this day, I’m still a better writer, but Arnie showed me how to be at least a competent reporter. When I left the job after two years, he told me he didn’t regret the gamble. Even now, I can only hope he was telling the truth.
From there, it was a twelve-year stretch of full-time editorial positions with a couple of business magazines and an alternative weekly newspaper, supplemented by a lot of freelance gigs covering music and the arts in Northeast Ohio and around the Midwest. My interview with B.B. King in 1995 was among the high points, along with an award from the Society of Professional Journalists in 2000 for a profile of indie comics creator Brian Bendis, who has since become kind of huge in the mainstream comics industry.
By the spring of 2001, with a wife, a mortgage, and a baby on the way, I parlayed fifteen years of journalism experience into my second act: marketing. I joined an independent record label for seven-and-a-half years and worked on projects with Dave Brubeck, Ray Brown, Esperanza Spalding, the Cincinnati Pops and many others. I did a brief stretch of corporate communications for a company that made performance coatings for consumer and industrial products (it was about as exciting as it sounds) and then did more marketing for a company that makes welding and fabrication equipment.
Somewhere in the midst of all that was a scary two-and-a-half year stretch of unemployment resulting from an episode of draconian corporate restructuring, but I fell back on independent contract work to help keep the lights on. Silver lining: the freelance work during that period included a feature story for Ohio Magazine in 2010 that won another SPJ Award.
I co-founded Flinch Books in 2015 with fellow Ohio writer and editor Jim Beard. We publish novels and short story anthologies written and packaged in the spirit of the classic pulp fiction of the 1930s and ‘40s. Neither of us are getting rich, but after ten years we’ve established a consistent following and we’re doing work we’re genuinely proud of – and we’re having fun.
I’ve written and published three novels in my Midnight Guardian noir adventure series, and I’m currently working on a fourth. About a dozen of my short stories have appeared in anthologies from Flinch and several other small-press publishers, and a couple more are scheduled to see the light of day in 2026. The newspaper and magazine articles number in the hundreds and counting, because the freelance work has never really stopped. Combine all of that with nearly twenty-five years of marketing, and my word count after four decades is well past a million.
I take pride in forty, but there’s still much more to do, so I keep moving forward. I’m grateful to Ken, Arnie, SJ (it’s not a journey, dammit!) and all the other writers, editors, readers, colleagues, teachers, friends and collaborators whom I’ve encountered along the way. I’m past sixty now, and the subject of retirement comes up more frequently in conversation these days, but I have no idea what that even means or what it might look like. The plan – if I have one at all – is to stay on the ride, however perilous and uncertain, and make it work to my advantage until I stop breathing.
Or until the wheels come off, whichever comes first.