Richard Mangan
Author | Phoenix, AZ
A Summer in the Catskills is my first novel. But my writing career began in journalism in 1988, when I wrote for the California Real Estate Journal and later for The Sacramento Bee, California’s third largest newspaper. I never knew writing a book would be so consuming. Writing news articles no more prepared me f.... more
A Summer in the Catskills is my first novel. But my writing career began in journalism in 1988, when I wrote for the California Real Estate Journal and later for The Sacramento Bee, California’s third largest newspaper. I never knew writing a book would be so consuming. Writing news articles no more prepared me for the ordeal of being a novelist, than a child playing with Lego bricks would prepare him for becoming an engineer. Fifteen hundred word-articles pale in comparison to writing a 128,000 word manuscript. From my youth I always wanted to write. When my friends dreamed of playing professional sports, I dreamed of writing sports books. In college I majored in business, but after graduation I soon found that unless your major is accounting, a business degree won’t get you far. So, I worked as a real estate broker in the San Francisco Bay area, where I endured the boom and bust of that cyclical profession. In 1988 I had an “op-ed” (opinion editorial) published in the California Real Estate Journal, that was a scathing attack on the incompetence of real estate appraisers, whose inflated valuations led to the collapse of the savings & loan associations. I then accepted a position from the Journal, covering commercial and industrial real estate development in metro-Sacramento. Thereafter, I wrote for The Sacramento Bee. After leaving journalism in 1995 I moved to Arizona, where I worked in state and county government for 13 years. And three years ago I began my new career as a middle school teacher in Phoenix. As a teacher and writer, I have the best of both worlds!