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I enjoy presenting information as an amalgam of history, popular culture (film, music, tee-vee, advertising, Internet frivolity, etc.), political science, fun and nonsense. Information conveyance, no matter how "heavy" the topic, should engage the reader; more important, the information should stick with the reader long after he's reached the end of the last paragraph. Of course, in today's society, "long" is a relative term. Let's define it as a period roughly equivalent to the length of a Jeanne Moos piece.
I've lived -- and nearly died -- by the credo, "Have pen, will travel." Working and traveling on four continents has afforded me the opportunity to witness incalculable amounts of the afore-mentioned fun and nonsense. From covering rock bands in Japan to processing metallic sodium at a Superfund site in Nitro, W.Va., I've sweat bullets ... all for the sake of information conveyance.
Spik rhymes with sleek, by the by. Slovenian ancestry, you know.
I've written for some of the best publications you've never heard of: The Chubu Weekly, The Alien, EL Magazine, Packaging Machinery Technology, Engineering Inc., the Cincinnati News Record, The Big Issue, Hi International, DC Modern Luxury, Washington Life and Washington Flyer. I was the official Internet reporter for Kiss in Japan. As head copywriter at a Tokyo-based advertising agency, I created and wrote global campaigns for Nikon, Pioneer, NEC, Bosch, Bridgestone and Shiseido; I continue to write feature stories for Nikon's online magazine, Nikon Horizons. I aspire to win the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.***
My formal education includes undergraduate and graduate degrees in journalism, and a master's in modern European history. I see these academic credentials as the framework for my writing, a solid scaffold within which to erect well-written and -researched pieces. Coupled with diverse real-world experience (e.g. dining with Graham Chapman, hitting a free-range cow at 85 m.p.h. in a rented Oldsmobile Alero, shopping with Angus Young's wife, flying China Airlines, eating basashi), the ornate papers bestowed upon me by some of this country’s best institutions of higher learning … Uh, I forget where I was going with this.
Suffice it to say that I fancy myself “a writer.” And an observer of society, politics, culture (pop and otherwise), technology, media and any other topic that has the potential of making us all more aware of, to use the vernacular, where our civilization is at. I don’t mind sentence fragments, either, and I don’t use serial commas. If you can’t deal with these peccadilloes, foibles, eccentricities — whatever you might want to call them — I heartily encourage you to read everything I post on Suite 101.
***Believe it or not, I won the 2008 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest! Found out on August 5. I'd admired and enjoyed the contest since about 1998, but this was the first time I entered. I'm very, very pleased! See the official results at www.bulwer-lytton.com.