Reluctant Flatlander. Lover of decency. Organizer of rocks.

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Growing up, I was the kid with a flashlight reading under the covers past my bedtime, raised on Nancy Drew and Billy & Blaze, and later, my father’s old dog-eared copies of Larry Niven and James Michener (back when starting a space novel with the Big Bang, or historical fiction with plate tectonics was not—inexplicably—even considered an issue for word count). I even read The Source. Twice.​​

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I’ve always been a wanderer. We moved a lot when I was a kid and it was a trait I maintained well into adulthood, living up and down the east coast, the pacific northwest, the mid-Atlantic, and near the mountains before eventually landing in the mid-west just outside Chicago. I went to school at SUNY New Paltz and University of Oregon before graduating from University of Maryland. I’ve worked in a library, a horse farm, an indoor rock-climbing gym, for engineers and landscape architects, and in a hospital. 

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During my first job as a page at the local library, I was once sent to the basement stacks to sort old magazine issues and instead ended up reading them. Many hours later (who knows how long I was down there), I went upstairs to find a dark and empty library. Everyone had gone home. And there I still was: locked in.
 

Long before blogs and Tumblr and all that personal media now entails, I wrote humor columns about the absurdity of life in my mishaps and misadventures, sending them to friends. In college, I began writing stories when a group of us—lamenting at the lack of mail—decided to send each other letters and instead I offered an illustrated serial about a sheep who wanted to fly. But despite all of the reading, despite working in a library, despite writing bits and bobs, I'd never really thought about where books came from or what sort of person could be called an author.
 

So after coercing my family into writing short stories with me in the summertime—and realizing I was the only one who actually enjoyed that—I set out to write a book, just to see if I could.
 

Now I’ve written a few novels and stories, with an ever-increasing list of ideas for more to write. Someday, I would like a book I've written to find its way into print, neatly bound with a glossy cover and set on a shelf. I want it to be so devour-able, someone keeps reading into the wee hours of the morning, or to know someone is so consumed by the words I’ve written, they too find themselves locked in a library.
 

And to the head librarian at the Wethersfield Public Library who saw a figure emerge out of the darkness of the library stacks when you thought you were alone, whose scream likely took years off both our lives: I'm real sorry about that.  

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