I'd wanted to write a book about my daughter for many years, but despite the fact that her story has always been one of my favorites to tell, I never failed to find excuses to avoid the work of writing. Finally in 2018, nearly 12 years after her story began, I found both the time and the motivation, and the end result was my first book, In His Sister's Footsteps. A year later came SOLO: A Motorcycle Journey, a short ebook about cross-country motorcycle trip I took alone in 1997 (San Diego to Boston).

 

Since then, I've been fortunate to find myself in a position to support other independent authors, particularly through the Facebook group Writers, Readers, and General Tomfoolery. The group was started by my good friend Barry P. Connors, a fellow independent author. I'd been a member of the group since it launched in April 2016, at a time when I was merely dabbling with writing. In March 2020, as a result of the world imploding from the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, Barry decided to open up the group to anyone, as a means to escape the terrible realities of the world at the time, and he invited me to become an admin. For the first four years, we had 31 members, all independent authors and those interested in becoming one. Upon opening the group and adding memes and humor, we exploded in both membership and engagement, and by December 2020, a mere nine months later, we had nearly 10,000 members and over 1,000 engagements per day. Today, support of independent authors is still our primary mission, but I like to believe we've made it a little bit easier for our group members, authors and non-authors alike, to get through their day in a world gone utterly insane. Long after the 2020 pandemic is an entry in history books, we'll still be there,