About six weeks ago I closed the long chapter of a career writing and editing newspapers. It was a rewarding experience that spanned more than three decades and led me from one side of North Carolina to another. As a reporter I covered sports, crime, government and some education. I wrote movie reviews for a short time and book criticism for much longer. I was a city editor, news editor, managing editor and executive editor before a retired from the business in November of 2016.

On Monday I open the next chapter, writing about projects for Elon University.

To accompany this move I wanted to start a site where I could post a variety of items about things I find interesting. It could be anything really but it’ll mostly come down to books, entertainment, sports, food, travel and media. I want to have fun with it and hope readers will as well. Yeah, I’ll probably write some about beer, too.

To get started I posted some items from a more recent archive of writing over the past few years — mainly about books. Some work was lost over the years — first due to misplaced clips. Today corporate changeovers in newspapers send a lot of items into a virtual netherworld. As I find some older items I’ll add them but I also aim to produce new content and keep things moving. Some of the reviews I have already posted were award-winners in the North Carolina Press Association’s annual contest. Not that I’m blaring my own horn or anything.