“Except for a stint scooping ice cream at Baskin-Robbins while in high school and a job right after college as a singles director on a cruise ship, my day job for nearly 40 years has been the same as my night job,” says Richard Kramer, “which is writing in one form or another.”

As a television writer, director, and producer, Kramer, 60, was responsible for such series as Thirtysomething and Once and Again. He got his start by writing a spec script for the television show Family, and he worked on My So-Called Life, a show recognized for its brutally honest yet tender portrayal of teenagers, as well as for launching the career of Claire Danes. Kramer has now employed that same insight in his first novel, These Things Happen (Unbridled Press).

Kramer, who’s represented by Gail Hochman, says, “Writing the book was a lot of fun for me, after I figured out that no one was looking over my shoulder, waiting to take it from me and make it work for them, which is what screenwriting is all about.” Unbridled Books co-publisher Greg Michalson praises the novel’s “real and fascinating” characters.

The author reports that the book, the story of a teenage boy in a well-to-do New York City family who suffers an act of violence (a subject, Kramer notes, that “to my sadness, and through no design of mine, has become topical”), was written over a period of about three years but was a quarter-century in the making. He adds, “As I look back on earlier work, especially on Thirtysomething, I see how I was telling versions of the story even then.”