Howard Dart Humeston writes novels, short stories, flash fiction, poetry, and humor. He also is a blogger and photographer.
He uses the pseudonym “Howard Dart” for his novels as then he doesn’t have to tell people how to pronounce “Humeston”. Hum-is-ton. That often leads into the story about his distant relative in England being chased by savage invading vikings up the Humber river. Trust us, no one wants to hear that story again. Mr. Humeston has Attention Distraction Disorder, a made up variant of ADHD.
He writes and photographs full time these days, as long as you define that as whenever he wants. He has no verifiable employment to interfere with his writing and photography. His previous employment history reads like a bad Kurt Vonnegut story, one he wrote while a one-eyed liquored up racoon was riding his shoulders and biting his left ear.
It includes stints as a mid-level manager at an atheist TV preacher’s church in Miami, photographing automobiles for a trade publication, working as a janitor at a blood plasma donation center, a clerk at a college library, performing copy machine maintenance, as an ice cream scooper at a Baskin Robbins Ice Cream store and various short term retail jobs. One of his favorite jobs was as a restaurant mystery shopper that took him all over the state of Florida eating at diners and fast food joints, where he developed a dysfunctional relationship with antacids.
Later he established a respectable career as a Branch Manager in banking, then as a full-time real estate agent and in 1990 worked in middle management in the U.S. Census Bureau where he says he resigned suddenly but the Census Bureau refuses to even discuss the matter.
Eventually he migrated to higher education where he worked seventy hour weeks at a university in Miami as an Assistant Dean, Director of Financial Aid and adjunct faculty for twenty-five years.
Somewhere along the way he earned a Bachelor’s of Liberal Studies degree and a Master of Science degree in Education.
Mr. Humeston has won numerous meaningless awards during his chaotic series of careers, but his most treasured award is the one he received in his 1960 first grade class for “Excellent Behavior”. Having achieved this pinnacle of honors, things went downhill from there.
His humor book about how a native Floridian adapted (or failed to adapt) to living in Boise, Idaho was published in 2021 and is available on Amazon. See link in the right hand sidebar. This is sure to make you laugh so hard you may even forget your name.
When Mr. Humeston is not working on his novels he is writing short fiction as well as poetry. He just finished a 70,000 word crime novel about a young high tech ex-black ops agent working as a Private Investigator in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Our hero has a bad haircut and a proclivity for not saying no to attractive women who insist on hiring him for cases where he will be threatened and shot at numerous times.
This novel is currently making the rounds seeking a literary agent or being submitted directly to Indie book publishers.
Mr. Humeston was born in Miami, Florida and lived for a time in Boise, Idaho. He is currently residing in a small one-pickup truck town in south central Florida. He is focused on writing and visiting as many good coffee shops as possible.
(Mr. Humeston gave up coffee once. It was the worse ten minutes of his life!)
Mr. Humeston is married with a daughter and four cats. The cats are single.
Pictured below are Dewey,Simon, Yogi and Louie.
Dewey assists him in plot development and editing.
Simon is his proof reader.
Louie and Yogi are novel beta readers.
Contact Mr. Humeston at humeston at gmail dot com.