Why it took me 68 years to write this book.

Red Fabric Chairs is my first novel. It’s contemporary noir. I had the idea for a couple of the key scenes some years prior, but I wasn’t happy with what I had written. When the COVID lockdown hit, I suddenly had lots of time on my hands and a real desire to do something different than the marketing and advertising and public relations work I had been doing.

I re-visited the writing I had done, scrubbed and revised the daylights out of it, and then went onward. I wanted to tell the story of a person who, through no fault of their own, was suddenly unemployed. Many of us could identify with that during the Spring and early Summer of 2020. I wanted to convey the hole one feels in their soul when life spins out of control. And then I could also squeeze in a few social commentaries along the way.

And, as time and my writing efforts went on, I learned that walking my dogs (two Labrador retrievers) can be great think time. Writing fully engages my brain in characters, dialog, plot, settings and descriptions. And I get to create people, settings and scenes.

What’s Red Fabric Chairs about? Arvin Miller is an accountant in a small midwestern town who gets fired, gets desperate, then finds himself in a position he doesn’t want to be in. One morning he hears a radio newscast and realizes he may be a suspect in a murder he knows nothing about.

As he struggles to clear his name and save his marriage, Arvin deals with the sudden death of a co-worker and uncovers a transportation network that brings residents of Mexico to new homes in the US. He travels from musty storage units in the Midwest to a luxurious Mexican resort to piece together his new friend Alejandro’s path to the better life he seeks in the U.S.