Greetings ...

2011 is undoubtedly going to be an interesting year for me, mostly because I've started doing things that I swore I'd never do ... starting with buying an eBook reader, and moving right on to Facebooking, Tweeting and Blogging.  Took the combined efforts of dear wife, daughter and granddaughter to drag me out of my simple fiction-writing 'cave' where I've been more-or-less happily writing my novels over the past twenty-five plus years and into the social networking world ... much as the young forensic scientists are doing with us 'dinosaurs' at the National Fish & Wildlife Forensics Lab where I maintain a day job.

So I bought a Kindle, and love it ... and I've tried to maintain two personas on Facebook (Ken Goddard & Ken Goddard Novels) with the help of my cheerfully tough soccer goalie granddaughter, and really enjoy the ability to keep up with the activities of distant family and friends old and new ... and cautiously tried tweeting a couple of times (jury is still out on that one) ... and am now taking that final step 'over the edge' with a blog to try to explain a lot of things regarding my work (wildlife forensics & coral reef CSI) and my books.

Is this a good idea?  Yeah, I'm sure it is ... at least to the extent of hopefully getting new readers interested in my novels, and to force myself into yet another new 'unknown environment' ... which is what CSI is really all about.  And it's probably a good way of reaching out to the people around the planet who know something about the problems we're trying to resolve at the lab ... like how to apply land-based CSI techniques (something I've done a lot of over the past 40 years) to damaged coral reefs.

So, here's my plan: in the blogs to follow, I'm going to talk about some of the real-life people and incidents that were the basis for my gory/violent stories ... and I'm going to describe some of the things I'm doing with my day job, such as trying to figure out how to come up with a floating evidence location tag that will do everything I want it to do underwater in in moving ocean currents ... and how I'm gradually adjusting to the idea that things that bite will continue to show up at my underwater crime scenes.

So, if those sorts of things interest you (I've come to understand that a goodly number of my long-time friends have taken a cheerfully morbid interest in my activities, especially if pain, suffering and cussing is involved), please stay tuned ... don't hesitate to offer cheerful suggestions.

It should be an interesting year ...