Once upon a time, I earned my keep writing and producing videos designed to fire up interest in a wide range of really cool properties and brands. Click TV & FILM to see a few projects. That career came to a cold end when my longtime employer laid off thousands in a single day. Having been circled then deleted from a corporate spreadsheet left me not only unemployed but also unmoored.

Years prior, I’d dropped out of high school and gone all in on rock-n-roll. Instead of landing a recording deal and getting famous, I joined the rank and file of the unskilled labor force. The list of my post-dropout jobs is a long grind: brick hauler, broom pusher, hole digger. The seminal moment in that trudge came on a rainy day when a grizzled foreman on a new jobsite chomped his cigar, then told me to fish-out pieces of trash and plywood stuck in three acres of oozing mud. Those muddy acres bordered what was then called Washington National Airport. The planes were taking off and landing so close to the jobsite that I was huffing enough jet fuel to impress Hunter S. Thompson. As I slogged through the ankle-deep grime tugging at bits of bulldozer-trampled two-by-fours, I wondered, could the dry, clean, well-dressed people in those airplanes see me, down in the mud, dirty as a pig? I had no clue. I’d never been inside an airplane. That afternoon I made a vow: somehow, someway, someone in my future was going to pay me to fly on an airplane. I'd find out for myself what an airline passenger could see during takeoff and landing.

The journey to that first ever flight started in earnest when I used money earned digging holes to fund a six month, coast-to-coast, solo-drive around the United States. It was a quest to find my place in life, and it led to a GED, community college, a film degree at a four year university, and a career that started in rock-n-roll, producing and directing music videos at the zenith of MTV’s music video era.

Having been handed an ice cold pink slip on that fateful, I found myself once again on the outside looking in, and using past as prologue, I set off to explore new lands—Eastern Europe, The Balkans, Northern Africa, the Levant, the Middle East. A year-long adventure followed. I met an unforgettable cast of characters, suffered a severe eye-injury, which is why I sport the eye-patch you’ll see time to time, and most important of all, I penned a manuscript, a genre fiction that I believed to my core was a surefire hit.

I was wrong. 

Really wrong.

Working with a highly regarded consultant led to an editor who meticulously edited my self-assured masterpiece. The key takeaways? The story entertained, somewhat. The writing hurt the eyes, definitely.

The rooster had been plucked.