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Sic Transit Gloria

At some point it will occur to most of us that we might rather be doing something else with our lives.

March 01, 2006 — CSO — There can be a dramatic triggering event, or there can be a slower, quieter gathering of unease and restlessness. I have been with this company in various editorial capacities, working on five separate magazines, since 1987. Throughout those years I've pursued a spare-time interest in writing novels. Indeed, since starting work here, two of my books have been published. One of these has been made into a movie. I've also completed two other perhaps less luminous novels, yet unpublished, and am busy with a fifth one, which is situated in the world of homeland security and the work of CSOs and CISOs.

As my day-job responsibilities grew steadily, novel-writing became a sublimated priority, more along the lines of a hobby than a passionate, committed pursuit. Both the time and the unencumbered mental energy needed to write a good book are scarcer now than they used to be. And that has been a troubling fact for quite some time now.

I probably wouldn't have allowed this to happen if the trade-offs demanded by magazine work hadn't been so intensely rewarding. The making of magazines, issue by issue, is a fascinating, complex, utterly absorbing set of puzzles to solve. The work, at its best, is flat-out fun. There is unvarnished joy in producing high-quality products for interested and important audiences. And I've had the pleasure and privilege to work with wonderfully gifted colleagues, and to be at the helm of award-winning magazines in which we've all taken justifiable pride.

CSO has been a special treat for me. This is all the more true because, at the outset, I so badly underestimated the astonishing depth (and sometimes outright weirdness) of the universe you all inhabit, which encompasses duties of protection for everything from people and property to patents and reputation (duties whose importance is too often unappreciated or misunderstood by executive leadership). Security concerns are now unmistakably infused, for good and ill, into so many aspects of our collective life. There is almost no piece of the social fabric untouched by thoughts and conditions centered in security and risk.

All this, of course, makes it strangely easy to contemplate writing a novel about what you do for a living (for what odd twist could conceivably not be included on the canvas of its plot?). To accomplish that goal (along with some consulting work), I will be departing CSO, effective with this issue (leaving the magazine in the capable hands of Derek Slater and the rest of the talented CSO staff). There's no question I'll miss my colleagues, the magazine and the audience we serve. There is something very much like a deepening dialogue that comes from sustaining a publication over time. After a few years we editors even get to thinking we might actually know something!