a few words about me...

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Full-time writer, award-winning author of dozens of books in science fiction and fantasy. I live in Washington State with my wife Sylvia, and when not writing can usually be found on any one of a dozen northwest mountains.

Okay, so, how did I get here?

The first book I ever read was War of the Worlds. I was seven years old, and the cover caught my eye (Martian tri-leg walkers). I picked the book up from the coffee table, opened it and started reading. Being only seven, I didn’t get the politics of it all, just followed the narrator as he travelled across the transformed landscape. It opened up a new world for me. And so… 

I was twelve years old, a sixth-grader at San Andreas Elementary in a small town south of San Francisco. Our teacher was quite progressive for her day and our classroom didn’t have desks, we worked at tables, six students each. Each morning, she would write that day’s assignments on the blackboard and we would work in teams to complete them. When finished, each student went to the back of the room and turned their card from red side to green side, and spent the rest of the day on extra credit.

As I was by now a big fan of reading, one day I chose to write a short story of my own. When my teacher returned it to me the next day, she handed me an empty theme book and told me from that day on my only extra credit was to fill that theme book with stories. Teacher’s orders… write stories. 

I went from a pencil to a manual typewriter (still have it) to an electric typewriter (still have it). Imagine pulling a page out of the machine, reading what’s written there, realizing you have to make a change to the third paragraph. What’s worse, a look at the full manuscript, and changes you want to make to page five will push out to all the pages that follow. Sigh. I did eventually send out a few short stories, back then it was paper copies in large manila envelopes. A couple sold to small press magazines. 

And then one day I heard about this thing called a word processor. I bought a Commodore 64 and got hold of a floppy disk with a freeware word processor program. Wow. This made writing stories a lot easier. I could make changes or corrections anywhere in the manuscript, print out a clean, updated copy whenever I wanted.

And then I took a look at the underlying word processor program. I began making tweaks to the code. This led to my dividing my time between writing and programming. I began earning a living with my programming, contracting to the Navy, then working for Washington State. Over the years I learned several dozen programming languages, also earned a BSci degree in Computability and Cognition. 

I formed my own publishing company in 2007 to better control my own work, created my own websites, grew my author platform presence. I began publishing my novels through the greybeard publishing imprint, adapted the titles to multiple formats (ebook, paperback, large print paperback, hardcover). They sell around the world, mostly in Canada, Australia, Great Britain and the United States. Most of my books have received awards, some of which I’ve listed on the Readers’ Favorite page on the Greybeard Publishing website. The page includes the full text of each review.

I began adapting my literary work to screenplays not long after forming my publishing company. Not sure what to do with them, I began submitting them to screenwriting competitions. Most have placed at least “Finalist” in various contests, with several wins. A couple of my scripts were picked up or optioned by producers, but these didn’t go anywhere. One screenplay (Yesterday’s Shadows) has actually been sold. I hope to see it produced soon, but it’s been sitting in the producer’s development queue since covid.