After growing up reading the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift, I found “Tarzan of the Apes” on my dad’s bookshelf.
Tarzan led me to Conan, which in turn brought me to Lord of the Rings. Along the way, I fell in love with Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury, and Clark.
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On a steady diet of great books, I had an amazingly adventurous youth!
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Did you know: When Tarzan was first published, it was banned in some countries as being too risque. Also, the first Tarzan movie's nudity was directly responsible for the creation of the movie rating system.
Posing with Collected Books in the Eighties
(gotta love that hair : )
I spent the first half of my life in a love affair with poetry. I even went off to the mountain to write for a couple years—moving to Austin, living in an efficiency, doing odd jobs to make ends meet, spending half my day reading the classics, the other half writing, then slamming poetry in the evening @ Chicago House off Sixth Street.
"A Week of Years" My Favorite Poems Intertwined by Narrative
(love the seventies hair, too : )
Poetry was never a money-making proposition, so when the computer I wrote with stopped working, I had to figure out how to fix it. It was such a fun puzzle I ended up working on other computers. My son came along, and I went from repairing computers on the side to full-time sales with Dell. As the company grew from 5k to 138k employees, I rode a wave of constant change, and retired at 62 with enough money to indulge my passion for writing.
"Riding on the Coattails of Genius" is a Pocketful of Good Stories from Dell
My new series, The Celestial Wars, is set in Austin, where I've spent the best part of my life. In the first novel, Harmon Waite is a homegrown detective befriended by a pair of Nephilim warriors who help him hunt an ancient evil. Before his twelve adventures are complete, Waite's realities will be shredded by evils beyond imagination as he is thrust into a pivotal role in the ages-old wars between the Angels and their Fallen brethren.