Robert J Gordon

My name is Robert J. Gordon; friends and acquaintances call me Bob. My first paid writing was as a part-time reporter and columnist for the Ajax Advertiser during a few years of career building in the Toronto area. Career experiences over the ensuing years led in part to the characterization, plots, and action in my novels and short stories.

Working for Northern Ontario's largest daily newspaper, I traveled the Michigan/Ontario shoreline communities of Lake Huron collecting background information for newspaper articles appearing in an annual tourism publication. I used some of the background information and scenes in my historical novel Disaster Legacy.

Plot characterization, action, and subplots ideas described in my novel Vacation Inn originated while managing a medium size hotel.

A change of career and personal business pressures necessitated a multi-year writing hiatus. I once more began writing commercially when asked to write weekly information columns for a local community newspaper. The editor suggested I should try my hand at life-experience articles. Within a few months, I submitted some short stories to a book publisher for consideration resulting in two published stories in Northern College Timmins Northern Ontario anthologies. My short story titled Collapse appeared in Northern Ontario Anthology I and a year later my radio play Diamond Jubilee became part of Northern Ontario Anthology II. In 1978 my Mines and Blazing Pines collection of short stories was published by Highway Bookshop publishers.

For the next twenty years, I wrote and rewrote several novels while working as editor and publisher of a community newspaper. Explored the wilderness area on both sides of the Highway 144 Sudbury to Timmins corridor led to my short story collection Where Rivers Flow North.

The principle characters and much of the plot line in my novel 'The Place' published by Treeside press in Victoria B.C. were influenced by aboriginal friends. The ceremonial descriptions originated from an invitation by a local Chief and elder to observe a Council of Elders ceremony on a First Nation Reserve. The Place is available as an eBook at www.kobo.com and a print edition is available on www.amazon.ca .

Fighting forest fires, a canoe trip adventure in Ontario's Killarney Wilderness Park, and participating in Sudbury's inter-union dispute in 1960 became stories in Mines and Blazing Pines.

My historical novel Disaster Legacy published by Saga Books is available through http://www.amazon.ca Vacation Inn published as an e-book and CD novel is available at www.amaazon.ca/kindle . One of my latest novels is an epic terrorism thriller Merlin in Disguise available at www.kobo.com.