Bio

I grew up storytelling in the form of role-playing games. Not the awesome video game versions that kids have now, but the kind where you had a pencil, paper, your imagination, and an assortment of dice. I noticed that generally, the more dice one has, the fewer the number of friends to share them with. I had a lot of dice.

When I played these games I was—more often than not—the gamemaster. (The one responsible for world building, plotting out the adventure and playing every character that the players did not.) While the narratives of these types of interactive stories lean toward the simplistic, this was nevertheless great mental exercise for crafting fiction. No matter how hard I planned every possible scenario the players (because they thought differently than me) would invariably make some choice along the way that I had never considered or planned for, forcing me to cope by coming up with settings, characters, and conflicts off the top of my head.

In our teen years my friends and I grew away from role-playing and my craft took on a new form. Songwriting. I was the front-man—singer, songwriter and guitarist—in various incarnations of essentially the same band for about 6-7 years.  I'd like to share the stories I have from those days, but hell I don't remember most of them, and I don't really don't think my bio is a good place for that. A witness stand is probably a more appropriate forum.

Eventually my angst ran out, a throat injury damaged my ability to sing, and I got happy with my life. Without chronic depression, anger, and my other self destructive behaviors, I had nothing to write my autobiographical songs about.

I moved on to another love I’ve always had: fighting.

It took some time to transform myself from a substance abusing, out of shape, long haired, grunge-rocker, into a physically conditioned, trained MMA fighter. But after a few years and a tanker-truck volume of sweat, I had learned: Muay Thai, Boxing, Greco-Roman Wrestling, and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu—stepping into the ring and cage 4 times, running my record to 3 wins and 1 loss.

During that time my desire to write fiction was revived, partially by one of my trainers, who was also a SciFi buff, and even still role-played. I never really ‘quit’ MMA. But it fell to the back of my priorities and although I may someday step back into the cage, I don’t have any plans to do so in the near future.

Now my focus is firmly planted on learning the craft of writing, honing my editing skills, and learning the ins and outs of the publishing industry in this turbulent era for authors, agents, and publishers. I live in Colorado with my wonderful girlfriend of 12+ years (that's how long we've been together not her age sicko), and as my day job, I write terribly embarrassing marketing material for one of the largest companies in the state.