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Welcome! This used to be my domain for my consulting work, but I haven't used it for several years and was supprised to find it was still registered (my hosting company had it as part of a package of sites, so it auto-renewed!) Since it was still here, I decided to have some fun with it.
 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. So 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 Windows PCs or even the original Apple II's). I got the bug early, too. In fact my first ”home computer" was something I built and programmed myself, with Dad's hand-me-down parts. (When Dad upgraded his "big" computer, and I got the old components).  If fact, this led to the earliest of my "professional"
years working as a software engineer writing
code. Not for PCs, but to control “computerized”
things, working on projects like engine emission
computers, an industrial dishwasher, medical
devices and the machine the squirted jelly
into jelly doughnuts (you probably think
that was a job for the dunkin’s elves, right?)I’m also a gadget guy, who now lives in a smart house you “talk” when you want to turn on lights and lock doors, as well as containing a pile of tablets, e-readers, laptops, cameras and computers in almost every room. (Oh, and I like my big TVs, too) But I'm also a creative guy. In a stunning turn of events that would have left my high school English teachers speechless, I've developed a passion for creating stories and now write novels (see below). While they are a hobby and I don’t try to make money from them, I’ve got a dozen or so finished (generally falling into the Fantasy/Sci-fi genres - more on this below). Those same teachers now know that 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 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 enjoy them.  I also read 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 was unceremoniously fired from his job running The Ford Motor Company (where he’s generally considered the “Father of the Mustang”), only to be 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). It also set me on a path of more classes and reading every book I could get my hands on regarding running (and often saving) a business.  For fun, I also read Robert B Parker’s books along with the various Clive Cussler's series (who are now being written by other authors with the passing of these two men.  With Mr. Parkers, passing, his characters (including the iconic Boston PI Spenser) are been written by new authors. They have gotten good - very good - but there is a spark to Parker's writting that I still miss. I also love his Jesse Stone books, which have been turned into TV movies with Tom Selleck as Jesse Cusslers various series of NUMA novels are also written by others now. (Some are now written by his son, who is very good also!) I am also very fond of his "Oregon" crew books, which are sort of a ocean-based (The Oregon is a ship) Mission:Impossible.   Add in 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. One thing about this Harry is he
sure didn't spend any time at Hogworts!).
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!)  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 to and continue on Netflix). It a smart, thoughtful "Modern Western" about an old-school sherif in Wyoming. Lately I’ve 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 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. (These are all on Amazon if you want to look them up)  Back home, and while many critters, like
Kody (whose actually name was "Kodak")
and Tribble (shown above), have lived in
my house over the years, there is only one
left at the moment. Meet Steve the Rainbow Leopard Gecko.  (1).png) 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 did 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 |
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 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? I remember it. Back then, I was working for a giant computer company based out of Silicon Valley. After been chopped up and sold off in pieces, they are all but gone now, but Y2K seems like it was the begining of the end for them. It was also around the time I got 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. Turned out to be a very smart decision since that Colorado office got shut down a little while later) 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,” and stopped looking for a traditional job. And this is how K&A, with a focus on entrepeneurs, started out… (And ironically, one of my early customers made an employee job/spot for me which left me flexible enough to handle them and also the consuting work and I've been with them ever since) So originally, my "business services" stressed planning and 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. For 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't I make money with this product and if I can, how much do I need to sell it for today that?" I helped them find the answer. And taught them how to run “their” business, but not a generic "business" class, but a custom class that was how to run THEIR business, fixing THEIR problems and dealing with THEIR uniqure details. 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 system 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 the
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? 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. It’s 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 about 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." This was probably true at the time, but to prove myself (and earn the coin I need to take over the photography world!), I none the less, spent my summer covered in dirt while cleaning, mowing lawns and doing yard chores. In return, 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 New York City for business and a stop at one of the camera shops that seemed to be everywhere back then, he 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 dumped for next to nothing) Now an odd quirk bout Soviet "consumer cameras" is the lenses and optics were made by the same factories that made Soviet-military grade optics. As a consequence, the were just awesome for my purposes. All the lenses were sharp and contrasy, 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 instead of relying on a camera's automation, I learned to meter, determine flash exposure and fall-off distance and manually do all the other things most of us now let our cameras do for us. I also built up my own 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. I started building websites and to support all the new digital gear I was going to need, moved into commercial and table top photography for myself and others. I also love outside and nature images, too (with Ansel Adams being one of my photography heroes) and have also done a good amount of commercial 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 and have my own studio, done events and created many glamour images. You can see some of my glamour work here: https://www.modelmayhem.com/woodykamena |
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Get to know my Writing OK, so I read a lot. Like, alot a lot. Occassionally, 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 really well received. People who read it enjoyed it and I found I like 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 (and that would take a lot of the fun out of the process) and I can spend the time I need to get the story right. So here are a few of the books....  PLAIN JANE So this one started during a conversation with a really cute waitress I was friends 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 before 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 who's taking out the magically powerful "Grand Wizards" and acting on his plan of revenge!  LAST PHARAOH: Flight Logs of the Starship
PegasusIn the mid 90s. I decided to enter the “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” contest. Entries were short stories and the winners would get the story published in a short story collection book. I was (and am) a big Star Trek fan, so I wrote a 10 page version of this (got me a nice “thanks for playing” letter from the contest) which 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 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 current day's 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. Today, we use MRI and other scanners so as not to damage them and show the dead the proper respect. But even if we as modern people believe the old ways to be just “superstition,” the question at hand was did we have a right to disturb the dead’s journey to what they beleived to be the afterlife at all? And what if we found a royal “tomb barge” jumping through space? Are we obligated to let the Pharaoh rest where he is, undisturbed, even if we could use the faster-than-light engine we find on that ship to jump our lost ship back home in our 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 but was far from the typical “damsel in distress.” When she loses somebody close to the drug dealers, she decides to tackle the problen herself. 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 and 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 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 Nana’s side. In Book 1, “Blood is thicker than Ectoplasm,” newly minted detective Mag  nus 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 Skinwalk 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 magic 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 night 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 be 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 he's also hired by a leprechaun who can’t find his lucky charms. And there is more on the way all the time! |
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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 me 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 “rescused” and brought home on my own, but about a third of them were gifts. At this point, there have 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 off (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.... |
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 Contacting me:So if you made it this far, you probably 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! |
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