My story so far.
I’m a New York City native. At age 16, having just graduated high school, I lied my way into the Merchant Marine and shipped out as an ordinary seaman on a tramp freighter bound for North Africa. My first novel, The Coin of the Realm—set in the summer of 1991, with the backdrop of the fall of the Soviet Union—is loosely based on that seminal voyage, and the voyage of discovery I’ve been on since.
Returning home, I embarked on a series of forays into several colleges, finally dropping out of NYU a few credits shy of a degree in English to join a gigging blues-rock group as lead guitarist.
The band imploded despite a contract offer from ABC Records. I made a living in Manhattan bar bands and fronting my own trio in the ski lodges of Vermont before heading west to Hollywood with the notion of a career as a songwriter. I met a guy named Richard Orshoff, the producer of Jackson Browne’s debut album among other credits as engineer and producer. Richard liked my songs, and we worked together for a few years recording demos and shopping them with established artists. Lean times, and I supported my fading dream by freelancing as a copywriter and creative director.
Eventually I met and married my wife, a wonderful artist, and legally adopted her two young children. Time to find a real job in a big city. A filmmaker for whom I’d written a couple of industrial video scripts knew the president of Royal Cruise Line in San Francisco, the legendary Richard "Rev" Revnes, who happened to be searching for a new head of advertising and marketing, and made the intro. Rev and I hit it off at our first meeting and he hired me on the spot. Thus began an unforgettable nine years as VP Marketing and Creative Director at RCL, which led to an award-winning career as a senior executive in the travel industry, and later the founding of my consulting company, Dubin Marketing Inc., which I’m still operating today.