I recently asked someone how their week-end went. They looked at me and said, "Well, it didn't go as I intended."

As I reluctantly enter the winter of my life, and as I (with something akin to horror) realize that I am now officially a Geezer, I can look back on that life and say, "Well, for the most part, it didn't go as I intended."

When I should have been laboring in Academia, I was engaging in minor adventures on various parts of the planet. When I should have been writing, I was an existential drifter, albeit a curious one.

At any rate, I should have started writing when the urge to do so occasionally flitted through my mind all those years ago. I finally did start writing, and published the Harry Neal and Cat series in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.

Sometimes I’m asked why most of the protagonists in my stories are older, ordinary folks.

The mystery/thriller genres are awash with ex-navy seals, CIA agents, hard boiled policemen, and other ‘super’ operators who are seemingly omnipotent. If the protagonist is a woman, she is frequently, beautiful, brilliant, and sensual. These protagonists are often involved with saving the world and/or engaging in highly improbable behaviors and heroics to win the day.

I find these works irksome. I like my characters to be average, imperfect individuals, not all-powerful, unstoppable plastic personages operating on the far side of what is actually possible. Apart from Harry Neal, who is 63, a bit of a curmudgeon, and carts around a handicapped cat, my protagonists are often older women who have lived a mundane life for decades, then that life is disrupted and they find themselves out of their groove and engaging in extra ordinary actions . . . trying to solve a mystery or struggling to stay alive.

An ordinary, older protagonist struggling to cope with a perilous predicament is, to my mind, more interesting and more engrossing, than an all-powerful man or woman defeating a supposedly unstoppable rogue. (although in my novels, Mudgett and Brewster and A Thousand Joys, the protagonist is goaded into action by a persistent, irritating ten year old, as I like to juxtapose the old and the young and have them trying to solve a mystery and getting into trouble doing so.)

Of course, the fact that I’m an older, ordinary individual, and like Harry Neal, a bit of a curmudgeon might have something to do with my choice of protagonists.

If anyone reads this and has read my 'stuff,' on the Kindle and would like to comment, please do so at bendad2@gmail.com