I’m not a writer. All through grade school and high school I read voraciously (I consumed Mutiny on the Bounty in a single sitting at age 10 – took 36 hours) but I almost never wrote. In college I took the mandatory English lit 101 and nearly flunked it. But I continued to read: science fiction, historical novels, biographies, mysteries – you name it, I’ll read it.

I majored in mathematics and after college I became an actuary (sort of a mixture of business and statistics but with a personality). My career eventually took me to Wall Street where I commuted every day from New Jersey on a ferry. While everyone around me was reading the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times I had my nose firmly planted in the latest Grisham or Baldacci novel. But eventually I ran out of books I really wanted to read. So I thought I’d better write one myself. 

Several months later, writing mostly on my daily commutes, I had a first draft of a terrorism thriller. Longhand. Three notebooks worth of nearly illegible handwriting with hundreds of cross-outs and insertions. Virtually unreadable. So naturally I gave it to my long-suffering secretary who somehow managed to turn it into a coherent Word doc. I’ve been writing on my laptop ever since.

Ides of March, published on Amazon in May, is my sixth full-length novel and first to be published. A Better World will come out in August. Both are middle grade/young adult thrillers.