A little about me...
I do not come from a long line of writers. My mother was a Protestant minister, my dad an engineer who always wondered when I was going to get a real job.
(I never did... at least in his mind.)
I always knew that I wanted to be a writer but it wasn't until the seventh grade that I knew I wanted to be a journalist. That was the year the mother of one of my friends - a librarian - gave me a copy of Ernie Pyle's "Here is Your War." Reading it convinced me that what I really wanted to do was tell the stories of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events. I got my first paid writing job for the Madison Press in Madison, Ohio when I was 15. (Famous place Madison... in "Travels With Charley" John Steinbeck called it the unfriendliest town he'd visited.) At the Press I was paid $10 a week to carry lead pigs to the Linotype operator and allowed to write a story a week.
My writing career took a small hiatus after high school when I enlisted in the Army and spent a couple of tours in Vietnam. I managed to survive both tours but not without some bumps, bruises and assorted other injuries. I left the Army in October 1969 with a Purple Heart, Bronze Star, the Combat Infantryman's Badge and two Vietnamese decorations and went right to work for a small daily in Geneva, Ohio. I enrolled in Kent State University the following January, just in time to have the Ohio National Guard show up on the main campus and shoot four students to death in May.
After surviving college and Vietnam I began my career in earnest working at newspapers in Ohio, New York State, Florida and Delaware. During nearly 50 years as a reporter I covered a variety of stories that allowed me to do what I started out to do - write about ordinary people caught up in earth-shaking events. Those assignments included the Love Canal environmental disaster, several hurricanes (including Andrew, Katrina, Hugo and Rita), the invasion of Panama, Operation Desert Storm and the Rwandan civil war. I also covered years of unrest in Haiti, immigration issues in Mexico, drug trafficking in Florida and more murders than I care to remember. I investigated rogue cops in Florida and wrote a long series of articles about infant mortality in Delaware that forced state officials to start prenatal care programs for low-income pregnant women.
I won a bunch of awards along the way including the Southern Journalism Award for Investigative Reporting and the Brotherhood Medal of the National Conference of Christians and Jews for an undercover investigation of Neo-Nazi, white-power extremists. The awards were nice, of course, but the real satisfaction came from seeing the stories I'd written get into print.
Throughout my career I kept a lot of notebooks filled with characters, quotes, story ideas and observations because I thought that, at some point, they might be useful. When my health forced me to retire a few years earlier than I had planned, I began writing fiction and, yeah, those notebooks have come in handy.
Currently, I live in Spain where I spend several hours a day writing and a few hours a week pretending to be a painter.
I have five novels on Kindle at present - four mysteries and one Steampunk adventure. I have two more novels almost ready for release. You can check them out at amazon.com/author/billington
Until next time...
(I never did... at least in his mind.)
I always knew that I wanted to be a writer but it wasn't until the seventh grade that I knew I wanted to be a journalist. That was the year the mother of one of my friends - a librarian - gave me a copy of Ernie Pyle's "Here is Your War." Reading it convinced me that what I really wanted to do was tell the stories of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events. I got my first paid writing job for the Madison Press in Madison, Ohio when I was 15. (Famous place Madison... in "Travels With Charley" John Steinbeck called it the unfriendliest town he'd visited.) At the Press I was paid $10 a week to carry lead pigs to the Linotype operator and allowed to write a story a week.
My writing career took a small hiatus after high school when I enlisted in the Army and spent a couple of tours in Vietnam. I managed to survive both tours but not without some bumps, bruises and assorted other injuries. I left the Army in October 1969 with a Purple Heart, Bronze Star, the Combat Infantryman's Badge and two Vietnamese decorations and went right to work for a small daily in Geneva, Ohio. I enrolled in Kent State University the following January, just in time to have the Ohio National Guard show up on the main campus and shoot four students to death in May.
After surviving college and Vietnam I began my career in earnest working at newspapers in Ohio, New York State, Florida and Delaware. During nearly 50 years as a reporter I covered a variety of stories that allowed me to do what I started out to do - write about ordinary people caught up in earth-shaking events. Those assignments included the Love Canal environmental disaster, several hurricanes (including Andrew, Katrina, Hugo and Rita), the invasion of Panama, Operation Desert Storm and the Rwandan civil war. I also covered years of unrest in Haiti, immigration issues in Mexico, drug trafficking in Florida and more murders than I care to remember. I investigated rogue cops in Florida and wrote a long series of articles about infant mortality in Delaware that forced state officials to start prenatal care programs for low-income pregnant women.
I won a bunch of awards along the way including the Southern Journalism Award for Investigative Reporting and the Brotherhood Medal of the National Conference of Christians and Jews for an undercover investigation of Neo-Nazi, white-power extremists. The awards were nice, of course, but the real satisfaction came from seeing the stories I'd written get into print.
Throughout my career I kept a lot of notebooks filled with characters, quotes, story ideas and observations because I thought that, at some point, they might be useful. When my health forced me to retire a few years earlier than I had planned, I began writing fiction and, yeah, those notebooks have come in handy.
Currently, I live in Spain where I spend several hours a day writing and a few hours a week pretending to be a painter.
I have five novels on Kindle at present - four mysteries and one Steampunk adventure. I have two more novels almost ready for release. You can check them out at amazon.com/author/billington
Until next time...
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