BIO

"All this happened, more or less."--Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

This is the story a genetically monotone American/Canadian descendant of Washington State apple farmers who in turn had been sired by Vermont preachers and Kentucky hillbillies. I came into the world at the Panorama City Kaiser Hospital during the desperate California winter of 1963, born to a University professor and a teacher-turned-homemaker. I sucked in my first lungful of Los Angeles smog on the way home to our little house in Northridge.

My friend Kenny from across the street ate garden snails and put the shells on his fingers, horrifying my mother. Apparently my first favorite cartoon was Felix the Cat which was ancient even all the way back then. My dog was Brownie from the Northridge Pound and she was the best dog in the world.

Seven years and one major earthquake later we lived in Honolulu, then Edmonton, Alberta (where I almost died of a kidney infection after being yanked of our Hawaiian paradise and hurled into a Canadian winter). We eventually landed in Waterloo, Ontario, and I was raised there among the Canadians, a happy people who love beer, poutine and beavertails and punctuate the end of sentences with "eh" but are quick to anger when you call the Inuit "Eskimos." 

With my hockey career and University English Literature degree finished in 1986 I attended more school in Ottawa and York before backpacking around England . . . sometimes I wish time could have stood still around that point. Eventually I returned full-circle to Los Angeles to pursue a writing career. After ten years writing screenplays for kid shows on Animal Planet and Fox Kids, plus a slew of B-movie action flicks for cable, I left the movie scribe life and settled into the proud poverty of a novel writer.

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After a number of agents and running two books through the traditional publishing route (wine and ambrosia for the top thoroughbreds but the rest of us end up in a glue factory) I've taken the leap of faith that is independent publishing. I promise to turn out some damn good stories for you and in return I hope to collect a few patrons along the way.

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That's about it. I travelled to Russia in 2007 to research The White Rose of Stalingrad (the manuscript available exclusively on my Substack account) where prostitutes swarmed the hotel bars and the buses looked like people had been hitting them with hammers and sickles since the October Revolution. I still reside in California with my wife and two daughters, plus a terrier mix from the Lancaster Pound who is the best dog in the world.

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