Early on, my writing career meandered through student newspapers, and into a college major in English Lit, because I wanted desperately to write like some combination of my four literary gods: Ernest Hemingway, Tom Wolfe, Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut. Nice thought. After failing miserably at selling short fiction, I made a giant soft landing in the advertising, marketing, public relations and magazine world, where young writers often go to make a living.

 

From there, I bounced around agencies, worked as a newspaper stringer, wrote columns and features for financial and trade publications, even did a stint as a medical reporter with The National Enquirer. I found my wife in an ad agency. I discovered how much I love freelancing. Then, without any experience in high-level corporate writing, the owner of a South Florida ad agency, asked me to write an annual report for a Fortune 2000 company "in that voice. Your fiction voice. Tell a story..."  

 

I won an ADDY award for that annual report, and my corporate writing career took off.  Soon, I began writing for the likes of IBM (18 years), Pratt-Whitney, Dole Food Company, Pitney Bowes, Sensormatic, Siemens, Citrix, many others. I wrote everything under the sun, from national TV commercials to videos and websites and print collateral and speeches for CEOs and hundreds of client case studies, where I interviewed customers around the globe.  

 

In recent years, I also published a couple books, one on prostate cancer and another photography book on climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro.

 

Twenty-five-plus years later, I'm still writing and editing copy and stories, because that's what I love to do — thanks, in some small measure, to an empathetic sixth grade teacher.