When I sent out the last edition of The New Single Copy, back in June of last year, I mentioned that among my plans were to occasionally publish a blog about the business and to think about writing a highly personal look at the forty years I was involved in magazine distribution. Well, I did issue a few blogs, and several of them generated some interesting feedback. However, as my exit recedes into history, I find my perspective is less and less valuable and consequently of diminishing interest to my former subscribers, so I think the blog has seen its last edition. And while I have interviewed a number of significant players in the business, I must admit that I have not yet been able to develop the literary structure to put the forty years from 1977 to 2016 into a coherent narrative. I may come back to that someday, but it's not on the top of my current plans.

However, in my last issue of NSC, I also wrote, "And I have digitalized the manuscripts I labored over many years ago, am reworking several of them, and will likely look into getting them into print." I was referring to the novels and short stories I wrote in the years immediately preceding my entry into the magazine business. Well, that initiative I moved forward on, and, somewhat immodestly, although at the same time sheepishly, I am announcing that I have self-published the novel I completed about 40 years ago. I did spend a good deal of time going over it and making some changes, but for the most part it is very similar to what I dreamed up back in the mid-1970's

The Year of the Lieutenant is set in Thailand in 1967 and 1968. A young Air Force lieutenant spends at year at a small radar site during the height of the Vietnam War and stumbles through some misadventures, many dealing with Thai women. Although I spent a year in a similar setting at that time, the story is completely fiction.