Waterfront Property

My 2003 book has been revised and republished as a Kindle ebook. From the preface:

"Waterfront Property was written in 2003, soon after my late twentieth-century environmental epiphany. A couple of years earlier, I’d bought my first kayak and, at a drifty kind of paddling speed, I had time to consider my murky Chesapeake Bay heritage. In the years around the millennium, I read many books and articles to better understand what was happening to the natural world. At the same time, I was writing business copy. Outside of the work day, I honed my skills by writing articles and attending writers’ conferences. I thought I’d write a novel about the environment someday, but the story wasn't coming to me.
 
"It took awhile for the idea to take shape. It wasn't until I interviewed a frustrated economic development executive in Newport News that this book popped into my brain. The guy I’d interviewed was dismayed by development and political winds that ruined the environment for short term growth gains. There you go. On the ride home to Williamsburg along Interstate 64 the plot thickened. A little bit of my life, a little bit of environmental development wisdom. A story jelled about somebody who suddenly asked, 'What the hell am I doing?'
 
"Like a lot of first books, Waterfront Property is a tad autobiographical: I worked in business but gave it up after my epiphany. I'm from a small town, Gloucester, not Mathews, but live a comfortable distance away from my old hometown in a nearby city. I worked in economic development for a short while. And like any work of fiction, this book is inspired by real experiences that are both consciously and unconsciously expressed. Although real people, places, and events stimulated me, they were just the seeds from which this fiction grew in my mind.
 
"In the 2003 version of this book, I used fictional names for the towns. In this revision, I am using local area names. But it's still fiction. My intention is not to paint any person, place, or activity as good or bad. I have willfully manipulated the facts in order to make fiction. But I did not invent the Gulf Oil Spill or Hurricane Isabella, so their absence dates the book."