Welcome!

Kamena-associates.com used to be my domain for my consulting work, but I haven't used it for several years. I let it go and moved on, so imagine how surprised I was to find it was still registered (seems my hosting company had it as part of a package of sites and never removed it, so unknown to me, it auto-renewed!)

In the earliest days (um, you know, before Facebook and all the other social medias of today), I orginally started the site as an "about Woody" page, adding the business into it as that grew.

Now, and since it was still here, I decided to have some fun with it, I'm circling back to the start.

Get to know Woody Get to know K & A Get to know my photography
Get to know my Writing What's up with all the Gnomes? Contact Me

Get to know me, Woody


Hmm. Where to start? (Well, thats me on the right. The tall one with Kody the Golden Retriever and Tribble (who looked like a bad toupee, but was actually a Guniea pig)

Um, ok. To start with, I'm kind of a techie.

I grew up with a dad that was an electrical engineer (that's him and me below in a promo images from his engineering firm's brochure).

Dad was also into the very earliest of micro computers (way before PCs or even the original Apple II's). Back before it was really a serious business, it was all hobbists. You wanted a computer, you built it yourself. My first computer was a kit dad bought for me. It was a 6800 CPU chip, a PC board and bag of chips and other little parts. Took me a few weeks to get it all soldered together. And then, using a TV as monitor, I could final start to learn programing to make it do anything!

Guys (mostly) who were into tech and really into solving the "puzzle" of making this damn thing work, were the only ones geeky enough go through all this!

I got the bug early, too. From my first computer, which I built and programmed myself, came upgrades via Dad's hand-me-down parts (of course, Dad had is own "big" computer, too!) Since I was very early teens and had no money, when Dad upgraded, I happily laid claim to the old components.

Fast forward during school and into my 20's, this led to the earliest of my "professional" years working as a software engineer writing code. Not for PCs, but "machine level" code to control “computerized” things, working on lots of different projects like engine emission computers, an industrial sanatizing dishwasher for surgical tools, medical devices and even the machine the squirted Jelly into jelly doughnuts (you probably think that was a job for elves, right?)

I’m also a gadget guy, who now lives in a smart house you “talk” to for turning on lights and locking doors, as well as a pile of tablets, e-readers, laptops, cameras and computers in almost every room.

(I like big TVs, too. Especially when the Giants are having a good year!)


But I'm also a creative guy.

In a stunning turn of events that would have left my high school English teachers speechless with disbelief, I've developed a passion for writing novels (see below). While they are a hobby and I don’t try to make money off them (or want the effort of trying to market them), I’ve got a dozen or so finished (which generally fall into the Fantasy/Sci-fi genres).

Those same teachers also now know I was right, that in the future (of my high school days anyway), my crappy hand writing and inability to spell would become irrelevant with the coming wave of word processing software and computers.


My creative and techie sides meet up in lots of fun ways.

I love my photography, a discipline that is both technical (and filled with gadgets) and creative. And now, when you capture a digital image, you run it through Photoshop for clean up and processing. (A sight less smelly process than my old dark room and the vinegar-smelling stop bath aroma that lingered for days.)

With my writing, while the stories are “built” in my head, the fact they come together on the word processor neat, formatted and correctly spelled means my readers don’t have to be able to interpret my chicken scratch hand writing to read them. Makes them way easier to share!

I also read a lot. Like a lot, a lot.

Probably 200 books a year. At one point I was doing a book a day, but that got expensive.

One book that was a huge influence on me was “Iococoa” - an autobiography of Lee Iococca, who in the late 1970s was unceremoniously fired from his job running The Ford Motor Company (where he’s generally considered the “Father of the Mustang”). But Mr. Iacocca didn't sit around and pout. He got himself hired to save a failing Chrysler Motors. (This was a big to-do as anybody who was around to remember the “government loan guarantees" of the late 1970s might remember).

Reading about the business world in this book also set me on a path of more classes and reading every book I could get my hands on regarding running, marketing (and often saving) a business.

But I read for fun, too.

I read Robert B Parker’s books along with Clive Cussler's series (both who are now being written by other authors, with the passing of these two men).

With Mr. Parker's passing, his characters (including the iconic Boston PI Spenser) have been written by new authors. They have gotten good - very good - but there is a spark to Parker's writting of dialogue that I still miss. His Jesse Stone books have also been made into some brilliant TV movies with Tom Selleck as the lead character, while Spenser yielded one of my favorie TV shows (but now old and hard to find), called Spenser for Hire with the late Robert Urich. (I have them on DVD).

Cusslers world of NUMA novels, mostly archological and historical mysteries with an adventure pacing, are also written by others now that "Uncle Clive" has passed. Some of Cussler's are now written by his son, who is very good also! His Sahara book was made into a movie that, while fun, strayed way to far from the book. Also, my opinion is it was horrible miscast.


Add to these series Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden books. Harry is a wizard in Chicago who consults for the police and often finds himself caught between the hidden magical and non magical worlds (and wars).

One thing about this Harry is he sure didn't spend any time at Hogworts! He also got a TV show that was brilliant, but only lasted one season. (Probably due to a too expensive FX budget for the magical effects)

There are also Janet Evanovich’s “Stephanie Plum” novels (fun, madcap mysteries set in my native New Jersey and often featuing places I've been!)

Sadly, another mostly miscast move lead to this as a "one and done" movie series.


I'm also a huge fan of Craig Johnson's Walt Longmire mysteries.

I first found this character when they made it into an AMC TV show (later to move and continue on Netflix). It is a smart, thoughtful "Modern Western" about a sherif in Wyoming.

Lately I’ve also been reading Steven Higg’s “Albert and Rex” novels. Albert is retired British police detective and Rex is his “failed out of police dog school for being too smart” German shepherd.

When Albert is widowed, he decides in his retirement to travel with Rex, initially as a sort of food tour (the local Pork Pie festival and such) at which murders and mysteries always seem to arise. Rex is really the smart one - humans with thier sad, tiny noses can't smell anything important. Just read the books and he'll be happy to tell you.

(These are all on Amazon if you want to look them up)


At home, while many critters, like Kody (whose actual name was "Kodak") and Tribble (shown with me above), have lived in my house over the years, there is only one left at the moment.

Meet Steve the Rainbow Leopard Gecko.

I jokingly say he’s a foster gecko as he came from a lady friend who asked me to look after him while she made other arrangements (she had just moved into a no pets apartment). She never made those arrangements and never came back for him.)

Just as well.

That was around 15 years ago. She’s long gone. Steve is still here watching the big TV in the family room and waiting for the next “Game of Thrones/House of the Dragon” show to come on and posing for our annual Christmas cards.
Get to know Kamena & Associates

Do you remember the whole Y2K thing?

Computers weren’t going to be able to handle the calendars going from “19-hundred” something to “2000” something? They were all going to crash and the world would come grinding to a halt.

I remember it. Back then, I was working for a giant computer company based out of Silicon Valley. In the 90's they were a big deal and making money like they were printing it in the back room. After being chopped up and sold off in pieces, they are all but gone now. Y2K seems like it was the begining of the end for them.

It was also around the time I got downsized (aka, let go). (Oh, there was an offer of another job in the company if I wanted to uproot and run the Colorado contracts office, but that wasn’t really an option for me. Smart decision since that Colorado office got shut down a little while later anyway)

So, I needed a job and went through all the normal “looking for a job” stuff. A few things came up in the corporate world, but it was hard to get excited about any of them. Couldn't see myself in a suit and tie every day, much less commuting into Manhattan. (I did it for three rounds of interviews and hated it!)

But, along the way, I got offered couple of projects. Not employee work. Consulting work.

To keep money coming in, I took a few that sounded (and were) interesting and low and behold, they worked out. The happy people whose problems I solved also referred me to other people who could use my help. The ones I enjoyed the most were the mom-and-pop "entrepeneurs," that came with creative challenges, often to overcome tight budgets

After a year or two of this, I thought to myself: “Hmm… might be something to this.” I was now making money as I was looking for at a job with a whole lot more flexibility. No surprise, I stopped looking for a traditional job. I branded myself "Kamena and Associates" and this is how K&A, with a focus on entrepeneurs, started out. Big companies had lots of options when they needed help, but my focus was mostly small family business and mom and pop shops.

More low key - less dress shoes. Absolutely no commuting into Manhatan.

(Ironically, when Obama was talking about cracking down on "gig workers," one of my early customers made an employee job/spot for me which left me flexible enough to handle them and continue the consuting work. I've been with them ever since)

So originally, my "business services" stressed planning and targeted marketing. I liked to point out a famous "Harvard written plan" quote which stems from a widely cited study (though its exact Harvard origin is debated) suggesting that 3% of graduates who wrote down their goals earned 10x more than the other 97% combined.

The same thing applies, maybe even more, to small businesses!

See, I found a lot of hard working people, who were doing what they loved, be it creating toys, fixing cars or photographing nature, but didn’t know much about the business side of running a business. Yes, if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. The problem is that if you can’t figure out what it really costs you to make, or how much you need to charge for your trap, you’ll make a lot of traps and no money.

Some of these folks, when they made little or no money in a year, thought to improve thier main product. Important, but not always the issue. The real issues is "can I make money with this product and if I can, how much do I need to sell it for to do that?" But with a now improved product, they could sell even more and lose money even faster!

I taught them how to run “their” business. My "lessons" were not a generic "business" class you might find at night school, but a custom class that taught them how to run THEIR business, fixing THEIR problems and dealing with THEIR uniqure details. Very hands on and very specific.

Now, I didn’t do it all. For some things, like year end taxes and such, they needed even more specialized help - like a real CPA/accountant, but again, planning was important. Show up with an organized set of financial books (instead of a box of loose receipts and check stubs) and that accountant is a whole lot cheaper.

So, going to work as a consultant, I did many different “business things” including cleaning up the books (and implementing the systems needed so that it stayed clean and tracked all the costs of producing a product), outreach and marketing (including websites and emails), growth planning as well as planning for the end.

Wait? The end?

Planning, right? What about long term planning? Really long term? What's your goal? Do you want to create an empire? A legacy for your kids, or just make a comfortable living that gives you time for other things? Can you sell the business when it’s time to retire? It makes a difference.

All this process and planning gets wrapped up into a company plan and a living document. Writing it down makes you focus on addressing the road bumps and gives you a road map.

It doesn’t mean you can’t make changes along the way.

Now, here’s the thing. I’ve been doing this for 25 years now. (Really? 25? Checks that math and that’s right…)

I am no longer taking on new clients except under very special circumstances. (Basically, a referral from somebody I know and have worked with or an irresistibly interesting project).With the lockdown in the covid years, my only remaining associate is a gecko named Steve (and to be fair, he’s not really pulling his weight any more, but does show up for all the holiday parties).

But that said, if you are having problems, remember this. (Most folks won't.)

You don’t have to do it all yourself. Lots of business folks use subcontractors and you can too.

Not good at certain things? Paper work? Big proposals. Corporate sales? Bring in somebody for the parts you can’t do. Done right, they will pay for themselves.

You can also read.

One book I always recommend is “Guerilla Marking” by Jay Conrad Levinson. Its 40 years old, the author has passed away and it has become it’s own “brand” of books on various topics now, but if you can find a copy (or one of the more recent revised copies), there are tons of great ideas and lots of good advice.
Get to know my Photography


I was maybe 14 or 15 when I told my dad I really wanted to get into 'serious' photography. Dad gave me a look that says "I know you are going to loose interest - you have the attention span of a hamster.” To prove myself (and earn the coin I need to take over the photography world!), I spent my summer covered in dirt while cleaning garages, mowing lawns and sweating thought yard work.

In return, that fall, Dad made good on this promised to get me an SLR camera suitable for "serious" photography. I don't think he figured I was in it for the long haul, but he got me the camera. After a trip into Manhattan for business (and probably a wake up to how much "serious" carmers really cost), He stopped at one of the camera shops that seemed to be everywhere in NYC back then and came home with .... a "Kailmar 1000 SLR"

Now if you just said "A what?" you and I are on the same page.

Dad had gotten (probably because it was cheap) a SLR camera that was actually a rebadged Zenit E exported from, of all places, the Soviet Union.

(The US announced we were boycotting the olympics in Moscow over their invasion of Afganistan and the "olympic" badged models like the one I got were probably already in the US and dumped for next to nothing)

Now an odd quirk about Soviet "consumer cameras" is the lenses and optics were made by the same factories that made military grade optics. As a consequence, the were just awesome for my purposes. All the lenses were sharp, contrasy and cheap, even if the camera itself was a cross between a 1940s thrift shop find and a piece of farm equipment.

(If you look at the picture of the camera (above) and see the rectangle over the lens, you are looking at the light meter. It wasn't even through the lens! Let's just say Canon and Nikon were not losing any sleep over this one.)

Now as a ususally broke kid, I couldn't afford wasting film on bad exposures, so I was forced to learn photography skills myself, instead of relying on the camera's automation, I learned to meter, determine flash exposure distance and manually do all the other things most of us now let our cameras do for us.

Turned out to be a solid education in the fundamentals.

I also built up my own black and white darkroom and soon was turning out some really cool images.


Fast forward a few years to the first (non-film) digital SLR cameras and Photoshop.

I have always been kind of a computer geek, so when Photography Road went digital and headed toward Computer Avenue, I was standing in the intersection waiting (wearing a t-shirt with the Photoshop logo on it!)

I started building websites to support all the new digital gear I was going to need, and got into commercial and table top photography for myself and others.

I love outside and nature images, too (with Ansel Adams (right) being one of my photography heroes) and have also done a good amount of nature and lanscape work, but in the last few years, with a little prodding from some would-be models who needed a photographer, I have also branched into events and especially glamour images.

You can see some of my glamour work here:

https://www.modelmayhem.com/woodykamena


Get to know my Writing

OK, so like I said, I read a lot. Like, alot a lot.

Occasionally,somebody would say "After all your reading, why don't you try and write a book?"

So, I did. At first, it was just to prove I could. I didn't want to be a full time writer. (Trying to make a full time living with photography kind of burned the words "starving artist" in my mind. I like eating too much!)

But the first book was fun and really well received. People who read it enjoyed it and I found I liked the process, so I wrote some more.

Twenty years later, I am still at it. I'm not doing it for money or publising, so while I always have a book in progress, there is never any pressure to hit a dead line (that would take a lot of the fun out of them) and I can spend the time I need to get the story right.

So here, in no particular order, are a few of the books....

PLAIN JANE

So this one started during a conversation with a really cute waitress I was friendly with. We thought it might be fun to write a story together. There were a lot of "we should to this" and "we should do that," conversations and then...

We wrote about one chapter and then she landed a job that required her to move and it all fell apart.

But, I loved the story's idea, so I wrote it myself!

In a twist on the Harry Potter world of secret magic in the “real” world, I made the real world the one where normal people had gained the ability to use magic and wrote a story from the point of view of the guy that couldn’t do it. (So rare, it’s a government recognized disability).

Happy and unambitious in his little non-magical world, Jon Jane is dragged into a magical world by a childhood crush turned pretty police lady. It turns out his unique “non-magical” way of looking at the world might just be what’s needed to nab a serial killer nobody else can figure out before he drains all the magic out of anymore powerful "Grand Wizards."



LAST PHARAOH: Flight Logs of the Starship Pegasus

In the mid 90s. I decided to enter the “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” contest. Entries were short stories and the winners would get their story published in a collection book. I was (and am) a big Star Trek fan, so I wrote a 10 page version of this. It got me a nice “thanks for playing” letter from the contest, and also convinced me that “short” stories were not my format. I filled the story away and moved on with life.

Years later, while going through an old filing cabinet, I found it a copy and decided to re-write it as my next novel length book. No longer a “Star Trek” tie-in story, I moved the time line to about 50 years in the future and made up my own ship and crew. And for fun, I have a captain and crew like me, who grew up on Star Trek and Star Wars!

The theme of Last Pharaoh plays off ethics in modern archaeology. Years ago, explorers “unwrapped” and essentially destroyed mummies to see what’s inside. They even had parties to do it and invited guests, snickering at the beliefs of the primatives.

Today, we are more respectful and don't do that any more. Instead, we use non-invasive MRIs and other scanners so as not to damage them.

But even if we as modern people believe the old ways to be just “superstition,” do we have a right to disturb the dead’s journey to the afterlife at all?

And what if you are a lost starship captain, trapped far, far away from Earth, who found a royal “tomb barge” jumping through space? With nobody alive the the ship for thousands of years, is he obligated to let the Pharaoh rest where he is, undisturbed, even if he could use the faster-than-light engine he finds to jump his lost ship back home in his crews own lifetimes?


DARK JUSTICE

“You need to read this. It’s a vampire book!” I was told as I was handed one of the Twilight books by a really cute gal.

I read it, but sparkling vampires were not really my thing, so as a “rebuttal” I wrote my own vampire story. And there was also some conversation about a female lead who looked like my cute gal friend and wasn’t a typical “damsel in distress.”

And well received? On of my readers, who was another waitress in my favorite restaraunt, came over and started hitting me when I walked it.

"You killed Vasyl" she said, accusingly.

Yeah, I did, but he was make believe. And already dead since he was already a vampire.

None the less, she petitioned for his return, so I wrote her a quick short chapter (not in the original book - just for her), in which poor Vasyl outsmarted his killer, faked his death and escaped into the night in search of more adventures.

She seemed happy with that.

On the back of the book is my favorite sum-up of the story…

“I finally met a nice girl. Wholesome, pretty, likes my family but she turns out to be a 250 year old vampire who’s role model .... is Batman.”

MAGNUS WOLFE (Series currently at number 6)

Two of my favorite book series are Robert Parker’s Spenser - a first person PI series with lots of great characters and The Dresden Files, by Jim Butcher. Harry Dresden is a legit “wizard” working for hire “finding” things in Chicago, often for the police.

With these two characters swimming in my brain-pool, I found myself writing about Magnus Wolfe, a newly promoted NJ police detective. While he grew up in New Jersey and considers himself a “regular guy,” Magnus comes from gene pool that includes a long line of “Medicine men” on his grandpa's side and a longer line that goes back through the “witches” of Salem to the Druids of the British isles on his grandmother’s side.

In Book 1, “Blood is thicker than Ectoplasm,” newly minted detective Magnus works with his recently murdered Dad’s ghost on his first case- solving his dad’s murder. On the way, there's voodoo, body parts theft, zombies and a guy that died twenty years ago. Magnus is never willing to accept the “easy” answer, so he keeps on digging after everybody else has finished and always gets to the real truth, even when that truth leads to evil magic!

In the second book in the series , “A Skin-walk in the Moonlight,” Magnus’s case leads to more mysteries from his Native American side when a series of bizarre attacks and murders all points to an Indian witch called a skinwalker. When his modern methods don’t work, will Magnus be able to summon some of the old ways to catch a killer before they strike again?

Book three, “Replay me the Future,” brings us a missing (or possibly escaped) Egyptian mummy, magic gnomes and a one way trip sixty years into the past.

What could possibly go wrong!?



Book four, “The Good, the Bad and the Undead,” brings Satan onto the stage. Well not Satan directly, but a wackadoodle cult that is kidnapping 12 “Pure and innocent” little girls to become his brides. One girl a nite for all 12 months of the year and as the cult stays one step ahead of him, will Magnus be able to stop them before they sacrifice the girls to hell in a throat slitting ritual?

Book five “Always after those Lucky Charms,” has a Batman wanna burning down buildings as Magnus chases down a dead guy who’s got a storage locker full of magical relics for sale.

Oh yeah, and there is also a leprechaun who can’t find his lucky charms.

I'm working on number 6 now, which has Magnus investigating 26 souls trapped in an old, abandoned asslyum by a crazy doctor who thought he could meaure a soul's weight at the time of death. He's on a deadline since he is working for one of those "uncovering the mystery" shows you always see on cable TV and they are covering the explosive demolition of the building in a few days.

Oh, and along the way, he finds an interesting family connection.

And there is more on the way all the time!



And one story, written for fun a long time ago (so some of the references are kind of dated, is to oft-requested "The night they shot Santa Clause."

A rousing story of the evil that tried to end Christmas and the brave elf who foiled their plans.

(You can click on the picture to the right if you'd like to read it.)
A few words about all the damn gnomes….


If you ever come to my house, you will see I have an infestation problem.

I have been infested with…. Gnomes.

If you are not familiar, Gnomes are small, long bearded dudes in pointed hats (although there are some women, who don’t have beards) and are a product of German Folklore. They are short (think older guy versions of Santa’s elves or maybe the Seven dwarfs of Snow White lore) and become kind of an in-thing in the last few years.

In my house, many have branched off of tradition and taken up different roles than the traditional miners, gardners and woodsmen of their humble beginnings..

Personally, my infestation started with a gift gnome who was a New York Football Giants fan (and dressed as such). Being a Giants fan myself, I thought this was kind of cool and gave him a place of honor where he was one of the first things you’d see when you walked in the house.

Now also at this time, I had a lady friend with a couple of small boys (under 5) who seemed fascinated with my Giants gnome and the stories I’d made up about him.

(For example, it’s well known that gnomes don’t move when you look at them. Their magic makes them freeze in place). Since little boys that age can be kind of gullible, I started to play games with them.

If the Giants won, the gnome would be front and center, ready to greet them when they walked in. If not, I’d hide him facing a corner somewhere (The Giants had a tough time that year and he spent most of his time in a corner). The boys, upon arrival, would always mount a search to track down the gnome before anything else.

Later, a (to this day unknown) gifter left a NY Jets gnome on my front porch and he joined the game. (He has spent a lot of time in the corner, too. NY is a tough market for football!)

Since then, when people need a gift for me (and for some reason, people find me hard to gift to), I seem to end up with a gnome. Don’t get me wrong - a lot of them I’ve “rescued” and brought home on my own, but about a third of them were gifts.

At this point, there has to be over 100 of them. I generally refer to them as the “gnome army.”

Some are seasonal - Christmas and Halloween being big times of the year for little people. Others are pop culture take offs (like my Kirk and Spock gnomes).

I even have an international department - sort of a “United Nations” of gnomes.

So, at this point, I have reluctantly accepted the title of “gnome guy” and continue to shuffle them around. (I will occasionally put one in a box I’m shipping out with and introduction like “This is Mortimer - he wants to travel and meet people. Today he’s meeting you. Maybe someday, you can also box him up again to help him meet even more people.


Hey, we all need friends....
Contacting me:

So if you made it this far, you may want to know how to get a hold of me. This is how...

Email: woody@kamena-associates.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/woody.kamena

(And I also have a phone, but due the the abundance of spamming junk calls, I'm not going to list it. Start with email and we'll go from there.



And hey! Thanks for visiting!