Father-Son Duo Takes Different Paths With Publishing Debuts
Like father, like son.
At least that’s the case for two Park Cities residents, Larry and Rob Pivnick, who are both authors.
Larry Pivnick wrote a sort of murder mystery, based in Dallas, about a man visiting his late wife’s gravesite. The visit leads him to discover his great-grandfather was responsible for a murder after a bar brawl.
Writing the novel came after Pivnick worked in two different professions. He comes from a medical and law background, graduating from both schools. But after becoming frustrated with those lines of work, he went back to school about six years ago and graduated from SMU with a degree in creative writing.
He wrote his book The Kilgore Curse after being inspired by a friend’s story.
But writing about characters that are always moral isn’t something that intrigues him, he said.
“Just saving everybody and being kind and nice isn’t a real intriguing story,” he said. “You have to have characters that are not just wholesome, good clean people or terrible, horrible people, but a mixture of a little good, a little bad. That’s what makes it interesting.”
While Pivnick wrote a fiction tale based off a friend’s real experience, his son, Rob Pivnick, decided to write a different kind of book.
Rob wrote and self-published a book about financial literacy for children.
After writing a book about U.S. history to better explain the Holocaust to a third grader, Rob, a father of three young kids, decided to continue teaching through his books by writing about financial literacy for his now 11-year-old.
After other parents and his son’s teachers encouraged him to publish it, Rob self-published the book, called What All Kids Should Know About … Saving and Investing. But despite the title, Rob said the book is meant for anyone.
“It is geared toward anyone from 11 to 80,” he said. “I wrote it for fifth graders, sixth graders, but there are college kids who don’t know this. My cousin, who is 24, said he didn’t know about this and wanted it for him and his friends.”
Rob’s background is in real estate and finance, but he’s not a financial planner. He calls himself a “relatively savvy investor” and someone who “practices what they preach,” allowing him to convey his knowledge through the book and to his kids.
“It’s a topic du jour. Everyone loves it,” he said about finance.
Both books are available on Amazon.
