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Something About Me and My Book:: John J. Heldon, Jr.(1947-) was born and raised in Bergen County, NJ. After attending Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ, he embarked on a career in sales before founding a successful plastics fabricating business, after which he became a real estate developer. After retiring at age 62, he continued to cultivate his interest in gardening, as well as a renewed interest in writing, having taken a course at The Writing Center in Englewood Cliffs, NJ given by Barry Sheinkopf twenty years before. He found time in his retirement for this latent desire to write which he couldn't seem to while working. His blog,"ivegotafunnystory.com" is a compilation of humorous friends and family anecdotes which he adds to regularly. His first novel "Ark" was published in mid December, 2011, and is a fictional tale of college sports, ghosts,redemption and salvation revolving around a multipurpose college building (nicknamed the Ark).

"Ark" is meant to be the first book of a trilogy. "Ark, book two 'Beneath'" is currently being written.

Ark

John, the narrator, is driving home one night, passing close to the campus of Sunnyside College, a small, barely Division I school in Delaware. An urge to reminisce overcomes him, and he drives over to the Ark, the nickname for the old gym where he loved to watch basketball as a student almost forty-five years ago. He’s able to get inside, where he encounters a basketball team of ghosts from Sunnyside who almost won the NCAA Championship forty years before. The team is in limbo inside the Ark, replaying games against the much larger university they lost to in the finals.
He realizes these aren’t any ordinary ghosts. Their older selves are still alive, and John has met all of them over the ensuing years. In effect, in this time warp, John knows more about these ghosts’ lives, and their futures, than they do.
The ghosts realize John must be there for a purpose, and he decides to find out why the ghosts are stuck in time, enduring a growing torturous loop of games without meaning.
While seeking to unravel this mystery at the Ark, John realizes redemption for the ghosts, as well as himself, depends on the actions he must help arrange with others, who aren’t, and cannot, be privy to his “real” motives.
If readers enjoyed a book like W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe, or its movie adaptation, Field of Dreams, I believe they will appreciate Ark’s different slant, served slightly chilled, sprinkled with humor, and a twist at the end.