About the Author
The author, Glen C. Carrington, is now retired and was a former finance director for a California Central Valley city and lives where a real life murder had rocked the national headlines as well as another high profile case that had consumed the national airwaves linking a US Congressman with an intern. The author has an undergraduate degree in mathematics and a MBA. Mr. Carrington is on several boards in his community, an avid tennis player, golfer, wine maker, chess enthusiast, beginner futures trader, and a general conversationalist. Born and raised in Peekskill, NY, the author has been living in California since 1981. He received his bachelor degree from Union College (Schenectady, NY) and his masters from the University of Rochester (Rochester, NY). He has worked for three fortune five hundred companies, mid-size firms, and a start-up for the first half of his business career and worked for two governments during the second half of his career. His final job was the Finance Director for a Central Valley City of 27k population.
Approximately twelve years ago, due to a lack of meeting interesting people with stimulating conversation, the author started writing essays to himself on various topics occupying the news cycle and the media’s ‘talking heads’ . When reading a newspaper, the author will usually read the opinions’ section after perusing the headlines. The first novel started as an intellectual exercise after reading the inside cover of the fourth book of a now famous author. That author also had no formal training or history in writing and he had described himself as being a burnt out computer programmer, a potter, and various other activities which had nothing to do with writing. But that ‘epilogue’ incident served as the impetus to Mr. Carrington writing his first novel. It took one year of writing, usually dedicating three weekends of each month to do the bulk of the work. The author would try to write perhaps one or two paragraphs each day and then go into the weekend with perhaps one or two pages of a chapter written.
After the draft was complete, a call to a college friend back east to just say hello after years of no contact, led to that college friend doing the bulk of the editing work. That took several years to complete since he was working full time too. But while the editing was being done, Mr. Carrington started on book two while waiting for book one to be edited. The following books each followed the same pattern…with the author starting on the next book while waiting for the editing to be finished.
Mr. Carrington was born and raised in Peekskill, NY and book three is titled ‘Murder in Peekskill’. The author has always been a reader of mysteries and before writing his first novel, he recalled what his ninth grade English teacher had said during class one day. She said that before you write a mystery, always know your ending before you start. That turned out to be excellent advice.
The writing of a novel requires discipline especially if one is still working and/or has a spouse and a family. Setting aside time to write is important. A subject matter that is interesting to the author also helps. If one has the ability to write a skeleton map of the book, a few sentences of what each chapter is about, it will facilitate and help avoid writer’s block. There will be times when the author doesn’t know what the characters need to do and at times this condition can cause a large amount of writing downtime. If the writer cannot fully map out the story then they may do so by knowing what the next few chapters will be about. Any amount of pre-planning will help.