In the summer of 2018 Richard was designing new websites and working on a new book… until a car smashed his motor scooter and left him unconscious for several days, with lots of broken bones and a traumatic brain injury. Richard’s websites shut down soon after he did.
When he woke from the accident, Richard learned that the brain injury had robbed him of every special skill he had. He could no longer write novels, build computers, sail his beloved J-27, design websites, excel at competition target shooting, and … and he still does not remember how to turn on his car radio.
Not only was his memory full of holes, but he could no longer cognitively work with the stuff that he was able to remember.
Crawling back from the car-crash event has taken longer than we hoped it would… it took years longer, actually… but here we are!
Because his novel-writing days are over, Richard has re-directed his creative energies to this website and to a web store — pickamug.com — featuring a collection of coffee mugs, each of which displays unique and expressive text. That store is in development and should be open soon.
Richard is also patiently waiting to die quite soon from agent-orange-cancer which — along with his bronze star and his novel “Hearts and Minds” — are reminders of his wartime service as an Army-schooled interpreter in Vietnam half a century ago. Even though his wartime service will soon kill him, Vietnam was the Great Event of his generation and being there there was absolutely the right thing to do.