Frustration often invades the life of a writer.

Never had that feeling been so unwelcome in Sheldon Webster’s life as it was on New Year’s Day 2013.

Webster was watching the college bowl games in his man cave in Birmingham but frustration weighed in heavier than his interest in the games because the Khmer Rouge war tribunal in Phenom Penn continued.

Although that mattered little, if any, to millions of other college football fans, it mattered a great deal to Webster.

He had been unable to finish his third novel, “House of Kampuchea, Cambodia’s CIA Killing Fields” that had taken six years of research and travel to write.

“But, I could not finish the novel because that war was not finished. The story had not ended,” said Webster, who was the program guest at Wednesday’s meeting of the Brundidge Rotary Club.

In addition to being a writer, Webster is one of the founding fathers and the former chairman of BKR International, an affiliate of accountants and consultants headquartered in New York with 160 firms in 500 offices in 80 countries.

Webster had prefaced his presentation to the Rotarians with the story of how his frustration turned into the inspiration for his novel, “2013: Memoirs of a Writer.”

He had decided to take a year to travel and write his memoirs of interviews and reflections on life during the year 2013.

During that year of travels, Webster recorded significant events, either planned or unplanned. He interviewed Americans who, to him, are significant in the whole scheme of things and told their stories.

“Some of these people, 12 of them, I interviewed and some I had never laid my eyes on,” he said.

Among Webster’s unsung heroes was Ernest Hemingway, to whom he was introduced when he was six years old. His dad read “The Old Man and the Sea” to him as it as printed in “Life” magazine and he was forever a fan of the crusty writer.

When Webster visited Hemingway’s grave in Ketchum, Idaho, he found an unopened, cold beer on his gravestone.

“I looked all around me. I looked up. I popped the beer and drank to Ernest Hemingway,” Webster said with a smile.

Webster said he takes pride in having visited every place that was a Hemingway place.”

During the year 2013, Webster traveled through five West Africa countries and reported on the mayhem of African life. He traveled through nine former Soviet Republics in Eurasia, from the Baltic Sea down to the Black and Caspian seas.

He had reason to and did write his opinions on post-Communist governance, the geopolitical beginning of the Ukraine Civil War and the failed attempts to clean up the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

“It’s amazing, though, that nature takes back over the planet,” he said, in speaking of the nuclear disaster.

Webster has traveled the world over and has seen poverty, crime, and corruption in many countries and has seen how people have overcome those conditions with “great spirit.”

And, he has come to grips with his own mortality and how he has made sure that his affairs are in order.

In fact, he has written his own obituary, “age 96,” he concluded.

“I once almost ‘bought the farm,’ and I realized I had to get things ‘in order,’” Webster told the Rotarians. “None of us will get out of this world alive. Write you memoirs. You all have done great things. You will do great things. Put those memories in writing.”