You may be right, I may be crazy, but it just may be a lunatic you're looking for ...Billy Joel

He has been a veteran nationally syndicated journalist, best selling author, successful ghostwriter, publicist and editor for decades, offering his own particular brand of unregimented, freelance ink spilling to a boxcar full of newspapers and magazines throughout the world.

"The Vapor," as he is dubbed, though, is much more. A former deputy sheriff, licensed private investigator and bodyguard, he is also a United States Marine Corps Vietnam Veteran.

And he feels vapid, oafish, and incongruous writing his own bio albeit with Rodale's Synonym Finder close at hand. Fiction, though, seems a new and enriching right of passage for this potboiler who never would succumb to riding in someone else's Cadillac.

The Vapor, whose vocation to the Catholic priesthood was never realized, remains tongue-in-cheek about his second (or is it third?) career as a quill driver, described perfectly by Oscar Wilde. "All morning I worked on the proof of one of my poems, and I took out a comma. In the afternoon, I put it back."