All photography provided by Paul H. Raymer

My 3rd Grade teacher - Mrs Sita - allowed me to write whatever my imagination could create.  The words were my freedom!

Who am I?

It all began a long, long time ago in New York City, on the east side of Manhattan.  I am the son of a long line of inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs.  Elementary school was intense, with Latin and French, grammar with the Carden Method, poetry, and art.  Along with many other things, I learned from writing a story about my mother’s cooking that writing could influence public opinion.   Boarding school included intense English and grammar.  All of this prepared me to successfully get my Bachelors in Creative Writing at Syracuse University.

I drew a high enough draft number that I was not summoned to serve in Vietnam, but the selection process seemed unfair and random.  I chose to serve as a teacher in a one-room school on the coast of Labrador where life was diametrically opposed to what I had experienced growing up.  There were no roads, minimal electricity, and the temperatures dropped below minus sixty degrees Fahrenheit.

When I returned to Manhattan, I wrote my first novel about a young man coming of age through the Labrador experience.  I was lucky enough to know James Oliver Brown, one of the best literary agents in NYC who had clients like Louis Auchincloss, Herb Gold, Katherine Anne Porter and Erskine Caldwell, who encouraged me to keep on writing.  I wrote a second novel (that also lives in a file drawer) about a Congressman who wants to leave all his obligations behind and disappears in upstate New York.

Feeling that I needed more material for writing, I took a correspondence course in consumer electronics and moved to Boston and got married.  I got a job working on an assembly line, putting projection televisions together.  After a couple of years I moved to Cape Cod, Massachusetts where I got a job working for a company that built underwater acoustic systems for searching the sea bottom and positioning oil rigs.  I moved into an old inn that needed a lot of energy to keep warm, and when the oil embargo happened in the late 1970s, I swept into the magic of building science.

I started a company that created and produced a variety of electronic control systems for hybrid solar homes.  I invented an array of ventilation systems for moving heated air – storing it, exhausting it, and transferring it.  My wife and I raised three children.  Through the ravages of the business world, I ended my company and the assets were enough to start up another company, which I ran for another ten years, developing a wide array of products.  I wrote a third novel (which also resides in a file draw) about an architect who suffers the consequences of designing a house for a drug lord.

After a difference of management opinions, I started another company where I developed even more products and began teaching classes in building science and residential ventilation.  I began writing articles for Home Energy Magazine on tools and eventually the Residential Ventilation Handbook which was published by McGraw-Hill in 2010.

Bringing the loop back to the beginning, I have written Recalculating Truth, a novel that explores the possibility of defining truth with a machine by integrating four human tells to draw a line between lying as a fact or an emotion used to define the future. (If you are interested in the research I did for that, click on this https://mailchi.mp/18b68dd6b7e1/liar_liar )

In July of 2020 I finished and published the fifth novel Death at the Edge of the Diamond about Jon Megquire, a twenty-two year old baseball player in the Cape Cod Baseball League in the summer of 1979 when a murder occurs on the job site he is working on.

The sixth novel, with a working title of Second Law, is a continuation of Jon Megquire’s tale. Leaving turmoil in Fort Lauderdale, Florida where he has been attempting to set up a professional sports franchise, he returns to the Cape in 1984 to learn about super-insulation and solar energy and gets tangled up in a heinous murder.

Writing is the transfer of information and ideas.  It is like writing music or painting, photography, or any other art.  The right words can create sounds or smells or images or people.  It weaves together the magic of imagination in other human minds.

Authors I admire