Author Lance Long is that literary rarity who knows how mechanical things work and can fix almost anything. He can operate a bulldozer, fly a plane or navigate a vessel to any safe harbor. Working his way through a Ph.D. in English as a carpenter, painter, and mason, he taught at the Merchant Marine Academy before abandoning academia for a rural North Florida beach where he could surf every day. From handyman, to contractor, to builder—over the following twenty years he became a licensed general contractor, real estate broker, and mortgage broker, and operated a very successful land development business.
When the real estate market collapsed in the Savings and Loan crisis of 1989, he lost everything, but resiliently started all over again at age forty-four. He researched and wrote an insider disclosure book, Banking on Success, about the banking industry, which he developed into a television infomercial and a resoundingly successful seminar business. For the next ten years his television shows ran in a half-million households daily and he presented more than 3,000 seminars and workshops in 46 states, Canada and Mexico.
After 9/11 he reassessed his life, realizing it was not a question of “if” but “when” the world as we know it would change forever. He fitted out a large live aboard diesel trawler and began preparing for the inevitable. Already well versed in prepper survival techniques, he had been cruising and traveling for most of his life in the Atlantic, the Caribbean, Pacific and Mediterranean; he could navigate anywhere and live off the gifts from the sea and land. Most importantly, if anything broke, from a generator, to a water-maker, to a big diesel engine, he knew how to repair it and get his vessel back home safely.
Over the past eleven years Lance has researched and written numerous industry studies and marketing plans on alternative fuels, solar energy, aquaculture, electric vehicles, and wastewater bio-mitigation. As a public speaker, he has promoted federal government programs against bio-terrorism in Canada and Mexico.
Lance lives aboard and cruises the Florida coasts and the Keys, an area he knows intimately; he is currently working on Calusa Coast and First Coast, books two and three of his NOEL trilogy.