Introduction

Hello all:

My most heartfelt thanks to the lovely and talented Cheryl Kaye Tardif for extending the hand of membership and inclusion to me so that I may join your wonderful team. As I wrote to her, I am both honored and humbled to be in such noteworthy company. I hope to post a blog at least once a week, as my schedule allows... and I hope to try and spare you all my boring, humdrum, or useless opinions or prattlings... or not. I am sure that I may have harbored within my breast plenty of voices, festering like unchecked cancers awaiting only the right moment, the right venue, to then launch themselves at unsuspecting readers or potential fans... such a delicious thought...

Anyway, in way of introduction my name is Arnold Wolf. I was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. That was almost 50 years ago. I am now gainfully employed by local government, with the opportunity to retire in about 5 more years. When not toiling away for my few humble dollars and much needed benefits, I like to write, read, draw, paint, watch movies and television, play computer games (I am currently finishing ROME: Total War), do research, fight, make love, tend to my pets, or putter around my garden. I am a terrorism/counter-terrorism consultant/instructor (I personally have trained approximately 8,000 people in counter-terrorism) and plan to do more in the not-to-distant future. I am a terrorism survivor - as I was an employee of the NYPD when the FALN (don't you love all the acronyms?) bombed Police Headquarters twice in 1982. Spring of 2008 I will be facilitating a course in Emergency & Crisis Management for a nearby university. I have sold short stories to various magazines and newsletters in the genres of horror, fantasy, Sci-Fi, herpetology, terrorism and security. I have also sold scripts to various comic book companies. I have created training courses, done voice -overs, written scripts for training videos, raised fighting cocks, saved a Golden Retriever from sadistic teenagers, have been beaten to a bloody pulp by another group of sadistic teenagers armed with aluminum baseball bats... and I have written my first novel, CHICKENHAWK, which will hit the shelves later this very month.

Now, please, I beg you... enough of this "I" stuff. Let us move on if I haven't already rendered you catatonic with all this rambling, mumbling and grumbling. We all have our experiences... we all have the strings of our lives that we or the Gods unravel before and behind us as time flickers by like the strobed broken film ending of an old black and white film... I prefer not to dwell unduly upon mine own... I look forward to my next week's blog which I feel inspired to name, "Blood on our hands..." I hope you'll feel inspired to read it...

Oh by the way, the joke about the answering machine is hilarious!