I’m not use to talking about myself, but here it goes…

Basics:

• Married
• Libra
• Born in Kansas City, Missouri
• Education:
  • BSBA - University of Missouri, Columbia
  • MBA - Indiana University, Bloomington
• Pets: dogs and any other critters that make their way into our yard.
• Hobbies - activities that I MUST like because I do them SO much!
  • Restoring our 1920s Arts & Crafts house
  • Woodworking
  • Hiking / walking
• Best friend - my wife, Tammy

Intermediate:

My business life has been in Purchasing and Materials, but that’s not the career choice you gotten if you’d asked me what I wanted to be while I was growing up. In high school I wanted to by a gym coach. I was actually pretty good in track and had played football when I was younger. A career in athletics was the logical choice. That continued until second semester of my freshmen year in college. That was when my track coach told me that if I wanted to be able to support a family I had better get the idea of coaching out of my mind. I toyed with the idea of physical therapy – then fell into a panic as I desperately tried to figure out what I was best at. That lead to several aptitude tests – but those came back inconclusive. As my sophomore year came, I fell back on the one course of study that everyone seemed to take, but that no one actually wanted to be in – business school.

After my BSBA I went out to California to “find” myself once more. While trying to sell vacuum cleaners door-to-door and flipping burgers in a local Santa Barbara McDonalds, I had another panic attack. That lead me to graduate school, and yes you guessed it – a business curriculum. I ended up getting my MBA to further progress a career that was not entirely of my own choosing. But this time there was one truly wonderful upside to it – I met the girl who’d become my wife.

Advanced:

There’s usually an object of inspiration behind all my writing. For ‘I Am Maker’ the inspiration was the movie ‘The Power’ from my childhood. It stared George Hamilton, Michael Rennie and Suzanne Pleshette. If you liked ‘I Am Maker’ then I’d suggest trying to find a VHS copy of ‘The Power’

The inspiration behind ‘Touches’ was of course the tunnel. To think that a tunnel with those dimensions could be found under a grand old brick Victorian built in the 1890’s simply blew my mind. The approximate dimensions (as best as I can remember them) were: the ceiling of the brick-lined barrel vaulted tunnel was 16 feet below the floor of the basement and stood a good 10 feet above the dirt floor of the tunnel. The tunnel was around twenty feet wide and went back around 60 feet (it was closed off after the brewery was shut down). To think – if the walls of that tunnel could talk, the stories they could tell.

The inspiration behind one of my upcoming books is undoubtedly one of the greatest scientific minds the world has ever known – Nikola Tesla. The inspiration behind another upcoming novel is ‘The Cave of the Swallows’ down in Mexico. Both of these stories portray the emotional and dramatic impact on man when confronted with the end of the world. I hope to have both published soon.

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