Perhaps I’m too prideful. There are things that I did at such a young age that it seems like I should be on cruise control at this point, but I’m not. Straight out of high school I entered the military, still only 17. By 19 I was married and within a couple years we had three children. When I got reassigned to Maryland we drove out of Alaska following a snow storm all the way out into Canada and made a “side trip” south as far as Los Angeles before we finally headed east. When I left the Air Force just before turning 24 I became the Network Manager of a small company and had my own office. A year later I was on the field for a baseball tryout with the Major League Scouting Bureau. Oh, and I was working on that book that became Deadly Heirs. That question, “Where do you see yourself in 10 years?” — I had my sights set high on that one. Yet, just over a decade later I find myself unemployed for the third time in three years.

I’m not going to whine here. There are far more people in this world in far worse situations than I.  I’m just frustrated that since I left a comfortable position with Howard Count Library of my own accord that I have repeatedly fallen victim to “workforce reduction.” Today I found out that after a month of working on a position that would have landed me back in my home state of Ohio it was pulled out from under me even though I had been their best candidate for the position. I’m utterly flabbergasted.

Let’s back it up a bit here. My day job is that of a web programmer, mostly PHP, some Java, been using HTML for about 16 years, and a whole bunch of other alphabet soup acronym stuff that would make most people’s heads swim. I pretty much turned myself into this because it’s much more creative than the network and systems administration work I’d been doing for years. I actually have a Bachelor of Science degree in Game and Simulation programming, but there aren’t a whole lot of game studios in Oklahoma. Something I’ve been wanting to do for years is put my detective character from Deadly Heirs, Chase Michael DeBarlo, into a computer game. However, that’s still not number one in my book.

Handling a megillah scroll in 2006.

Writer/researcher looking for work. I get the greatest thrill out of researching the past, paranormal and otherwise, and then writing about it. Traveling to historic locations, breathing in the atmosphere, cracking open the old tomes and uncovering lost truths — yeah, that’s me. Back in 2006 when I was attending Library Associate’s training for the state of Maryland, I received the rare opportunity to handle a 600 year old megillah scroll that had been recently discovered in the basement archives of Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Library. Now the idea of rambling about in the basement archives is fantastic, and handling that scroll was a thrill. That day at lunch my friend Luis Salazar and I had also gone to the Westminster Burial Grounds to visit Edgar Allan Poe’s grave, so it was a heck of a day. Give me that everyday. Speaking of Luis, he and I once spent an afternoon locating the site of the old Madison Avenue Grounds baseball field, long since gone, using a map from 1870!I relentlessly dig. For many of our paranormal investigations I’ve spent hours upon hours of my personal time diving into newspaper archives, land records, and other journals searching for connections and affirmations or negations of claims. For my books Ghosts of Maryland and Ghosts and Legends of Oklahoma I can’t begin to count the time that went into those, but for those I dug into old books and court transcripts as well. The only problem is that none of this pays the bills. The little bit that I get from the books currently goes right back into marketing and promoting the books. And the job  market for “writer dude that will dig for old historic facts” is, well… does that exist? Museum curator, perhaps? How often does something like that become available? A roaming historian? If someone reading this has any ideas, please let me know.

In the meantime, with game design and programming not really an option, it’s on with the web programming to put food on the table. Oh, I could always fall back to network administration type work if I really had to, but I really don’t and it’s been a few years. I prefer being creative, and programming is about the most creative you can be with computers outside of digital graphic design. So I’ll continue following up a few other leads and see where I land. Ultimately, I hope that’s on a bestseller’s list somewhere, but in the meantime I need to put on the hat of my Wimgo moniker, the Phantom Programmer.