I stopped trying to publish.  But I didn’t stop writing as I moved on to a satisfying career as a public relations counselor and management advisor, primarily in academe.  I helped Nobel Laureate David Baltimore found the Whitehead Institute at MIT, served with my wife Judith, an MIT professor, as housemasters at MIT’s largest dorm, went with David when he became president of Rockefeller University, then was recruited by the University of Southern California to help reorganize communications — and other things — in the School of Medicine.  The USC gig, just temporary at first, lasted ten years.

At USC, immersed in academic disputes that, as the saying goes, are bitter because so little is at stake, I began to assemble thoughts about how important things that occurred in my multiple careers night be written about.  I had, after all, been a jet fighter pilot with an unusual hitch:  trained to launch an atomic bomb from my fighter.

The top secret operation in which I was engaged as a young, naïve lieutenant was a plan to conduct a sneak, paralyzing attack on China, North Korea and the Soviet Union.  A simultaneous attack by several hundred nuclear-armed fighters.

The raid didn’t occur, fortunately, but my novel, “Fallout: remains of an atomic war,” did surface.  I sent it around in draft form to a few agents, and to a publisher or two, but never heard back.  Not even a courtesy card.  Talk about your top secret.

So I self-published with Amazon, did no marketing, sold probably a few dozen books and an unknown number of Kindle free reads.

My preoccupation with war led me to examine what happened when some 30,000 veterans of World War I and their families marched on Washington in 1932.  All deep in poverty, nearly all had lost their homes.  It was the onset of the Great Depression.  The veterans were promised a desperately-needed bonus for their service.  President Hoover sicced the army on them.  Guns were fired, gas spewed, the hovels in which they huddled burned to the ground.

I imagined the aftermath for one of those families, how that veteran got to that point.  I called it “Exiles: a curveball called destiny,”  concluding the need to wage war is a disease.

I’m creeping up on my 89th birthday, still writing, and sharpening my focus on stories I deem need to be told.  Not lovely stories of passion fulfilled, or mysterious forces from outer space.  I’m looking at what’s happening here, now, so:

My third novel, “Prelude to a sting,” which which appeared in fall 2020, follows two young women.  It examines what happens to gifted young women inside MIT, how they play important roles in expanding women’s rights, and how these two young women pioneer a successful computer company.  

Successful pioneers even though both were raped as children.

The story is built upon experiences Judith and I had when we were housemasters at MIT, where young women had a tough time with aggressive males. A few not only survived, but thrived. “Prelude” imagines one of the latter.