About Me

In the beginning, I painted with jam and applesauce, to my mom’s eternal displeasure. Soon, and for decades after, I painted with various pigments and stains, as grown artists generally did. I’ve been painting with pixels ever since the computer came along, but I’ve only been painting with words for a decade or so now. It was an old friend, and sometimes ‘Beta’ reader, who first drew that correlation of painting with words.

Some small part of my brain had always seemed to revise bits of my own life experiences, in the back of my head, as well as other people’s books, shows and movies nearly all day, every day. It was only recently, that I realized that not everyone’s head did that. Now, I give that small part of my gray matter free rein for a few hours, nearly every day, as best I can.

My life has not been one that many people would consider very ordinary. In fact, some might consider much of it haphazard wandering, or worse.

In my twenties, I lived wild in the tropics for a few years, half expecting the various governments of the world to blow the holy hell out of us all. I’ve done virtually any job that required a strong back and little else. I’ve worked as a lumberjack, a truck driver and a male stripper. Early on, I walked away from a career in engineering, to struggle as a graphic artist; in a state on the far side of the country. That, in turn, evolved into a quarter-century gig teaching illustration and graphics at a small California college. I raised a son, on my own for many years, and helped to raise his older brother, as well. I’ve had my heart dismantled a time or two — and I’m not proud to say, I’ve probably done much the same to a heart or two, myself, along the way.

Where little of such a background would seem to be of much use to most people, it had the fortunate side effect of setting the stage for me to be a halfway decent storyteller, with plenty of strange experiences and colorful characters to draw upon, as I do. I began ‘writing a novel’ thirty-some years back, but all I had to show for the better part of two decades of work was a really thick notebook, bursting with scraps of dialogue, action scenes and random notes, but only about sixty pages of actual written material. Fourteen years back, I finally got serious. I won’t bore you with the details of the circumstances leading to the epiphanette that changed my approach. Suffice it to say, I finally began writing first thing every day, and now I am twenty-five novels in, and counting. As my associates and I travel through the tedious, soul-battering process of edits, rewrites and re-edits, those first projects are finally ready to offer up to you, the novel-loving public.  

What you will find here is the end result of all I have just shared with you. I trust you will find escape and enjoyment among these worlds and characters. I hope at least some of these imaginary souls I’ve come to love — and sometimes hate — have a similar effect on you.