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James J. Patterson's first book has been 20 years in the making. The former professional musician turned sports magazine owner is on to what he describes as his retirement, a new career in writing and publishing books.

The Bethesda resident's "Bermuda Shorts" is a collection of personal essays about, among other things, life, love, politics and sports. It is published by Alan Squire Publishing, the small press that he began with his wife, poet Rose Solari.

At the outset, Patterson thought he was setting out to write a book about big picture issues. What he wound up writing was much closer to a memoir.

"When I laid [the essays] all down in a row, I couldn't believe how personal they are," he says. "I thought, Hey! I didn't set out to write a memoir!"

Most of the essays include vivid portrayals of Patterson's experiences mixed in with some of his ruminations about life. In "Lovesick Lake," he talks about his deep connection to his family's vacation home outside of Toronto. In "Sculpture Isn't ...," he recalls an afternoon of thought and contemplation while sipping wine and reading the poems of Lawrence Ferlinghetti at a restaurant. In "The Nearest Thing to Perfection," the author outlines his mother's lifelong love affair with baseball.

"I decided to make it short and to the point," Patterson says of the book. "You know, people are busy."

Patterson says he was careful to craft the essays in such a way that readers could engage with them. The challenge with writing personal essays, he says, is to break free of the overuse of the pronoun "I" and to "let your characters tell the story."

Before becoming an author, Patterson spent 15 years touring with the political satire band The Pheromones, with whom he put out four major albums and made eight music videos. While working as a musician, he developed a habit of carrying a small notebook in his back pocket to capture a hook line should it pop into his head.

He employs the same method now for his writing. "Whenever somebody says something that you just – you don't ever want to forget it," he says.

Patterson has almost completed his first book of fiction, which is a historical novel about the American oil field in the Williston Basin in Montana, the Dakotas and Saskatchewan. A second book of essays also is in the works.

In the spirit of creative non-fiction, everything Patterson writes about in "Bermuda Shorts" actually happened, although he admits to having taken liberties with the order of events and compressing some parts.

"It turns it into a moving story rather than just an event," he explains.

The essays that made it into "Bermuda Shorts" were just a few of the many Patterson has written.

"We whittled it down a lot," he says.

Many places and people pop up in several of the stories.

"There are a lot of linkages between these stories," Patterson says, but it's done "without hitting you over the head with it." The result, he adds, is a collection of stories that hang together as one body of work.

Patterson describes his first book as the story of how he has dealt with his humanity and coped with the circumstances of life to become the person he is.

"Through all these stories, an image emerges of the making of a self." In short, says Patterson, "It's how I became a man."

"Bermuda Shorts" is available for purchase at www.alansquirepublishing.com.