Introduction

I am the author of the upcoming book My Heart Has No Home: A Grief Journal, a moment-by-moment account of my experience grieving the sudden death of my wife, Amy K.W. Heil – what I felt, how I healed, and what I learned.

I want to identify as a screenwriter, but as with most of my 25-year IT career, I find myself collecting multiple hats in my literary pursuits. I have always loved playing with words, and remember at the age of four referring to my elbow as my “ell bone” – because my arm was ell shaped. Growing up, I read constantly (200 books one summer for a library contest), engaged in creative word usement with my siblings (many nouns were verbed), and actually enjoyed writing essays in school.

In high school I began to see myself as a writer, thanks to a creative writing class – where I wrote my first story by imagining it as a movie – and encouragement from my favorite English teacher.  In college, I tried to become a geophysicist, but ended up with a job writing press releases and a B.A. in Linguistics (perhaps the acme of word and language geekery), after which I stumbled into IT.  Even then, I still often found myself crafting with words as a technical writer.

Along the way, I dabbled with short poetry, flash fiction, short stories, a novelette, and a novel, and starting a non-fiction book on sustainability.  Then in 2007, I discovered and fell in love with screenwriting, which became the focus of my writing life.  Well, except for the long poem I published in 2016.  And the memoir I ghostwrote in 2017.  And the graphic novel project I started in 2019.  And that playwriting class.  And now this new non-fiction book.

I have a number of projects in various stages of development, from a short story in need of a publisher, to a couple short films, to feature film scripts, to graphic novels (one based on my published poem).