At a very early age it was evident I could draw. So I went to Brooklyn Tech where I ignored English and literature entirely in favor of art in all of its permutations.

One day, during my freshman prefect class, Mr. Rabinowitz, my prefect/math/truant officer/teacher, assigned me to write twenty pages about something, anything, for being unruly in his sphere. It was a struggle, but I did it that night.

The next morning, I came to school prepared to stand up and read it in front of my unruly, heckling peers, but Rocky Rabinowitz never even asked me to. In fact, he never asked if I’d even done it. I was pissed. I folded my masterpiece and put it away.

I continued majoring in art's mutations, in time becoming an art director in big time advertising agencies, working opposite some of the best writers around. It clawed at me however, when they often struggled and we both suffered through their writer’s blockages. I often fed them headlines, body copy, and scripts for television spots, gratis. I didn’t want them to feel the stuff wasn’t entirely theirs and resist the input. So I discreetly put the ideas and words into their heads and patted them on the back to make it all come out of their mouths so they could feel some proprietary ownership and go forward. It worked so well that I'm sure to this day, nobody realizes it. We all went on to have award winning careers. They as writers and me as an art director.

Every ten years or so, I’d stumble across the piece I’d written as a freshman and couldn’t help thinking that it was better than most of what copywriters in the business were generating. Not necessarily grammatically, but in a right brain way.

So, thirty five years into a career, I retired from being the art director, creative director, director/cameraman, in favor of the quill. So, this book.

Surprisingly, but maybe not, the book is an award finalist, too. And very soon, hopefully, another. If Grandma Moses could leave a trail of paintings behind, my goal is to leave an equivalent number of books, just because no one ever encouraged me to write at all.