The First Post, an Introduction

Hello, and welcome to my new blog! I am not new to the world of blogging, having recently returned from Bulgaria where I posted regularly at Ellis and Jodie’s Bulgarian Adventures. As part of my full time job, I post about the world of poker on the Titan Poker Blog. But this is the first time I’ve decided to create an online home for my writing.

You can expect to find opinion pieces, book reviews, short stories, general musings, and information about my upcoming novel - a work in progress. Articles that appear on this blog will range across a wide variety of subjects. I hope you will enjoy!

For those who don’t know me, I was born in Sioux City, Iowa, and moved to Israel (made aliya) in 1972 at the age of fifteen. I finished high school in Jerusalem, served in the Israeli army, was a founding member of Kibbutz Yahel in Israel’s southern Arava desert, and now live on Moshav Neve Ilan outside Jerusalem with my wife, Jodie. We have three children and one granddaughter.

On the kibbutz I worked for many years in agriculture, including pest control and at a dairy barn milking cows. Later, while living on the moshav, I received formal training in the hospitality industry, including a course of Hotel Management at the Technion’s Tel Aviv branch. I worked for fifteen years in various capacities at the Neve Ilan Hotel before going on to work as Food and Beverage Controller at the Jerusalem Hilton.

In 2000-2001 I worked as webmaster for Yazam, a Jerusalem-based company that went international with the goal of financing high tech start-ups. Unfortunately this coincided with the collapse of that very same industry and the company went out of business.

Between 2001 and 2004 I served as Editor in Chief of Israel Insider, an online daily Israeli newsmagazine. I wrote news articles about Israel and managed a database of over 300 contributors of opinion pieces on all sides of the Israeli political spectrum.

Since 2004 I have been working for The Nation Traffic, a marketing company in Ramat Gan that promotes online gaming, in my case, online poker. These efforts targeted countries where it is legal to play these games (not the United States). In this job I traveled and reported about the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, the Asian Poker Tour in Macau, as well as making visits to London and Manila.

Between 2009 and 2010 I worked at corporate headquarters in Sofia, Bulgaria. During these two years, my wife and I traveled extensively around Bulgaria and the surrounding countries, falling in love with the region and its unique culture and history.

I have always been a writer at heart, and this blog will highlight my creativity. I self-published The Virtual Kibbutz, a short story collection, in 2003, and the book was a finalist in the Fiction – Short Stories category of the ForeWord Magazine 2003 Book of the Year Awards.

And now I am in the advanced stages of editing my novel. More information on this in future posts on this blog.

Enjoy the read!

Ellis