It started with books - library books. "Choose Your Own Adventure" books - I've always loved a good adventure. I bought a collection of Louis L'Amour Westerns at a garage sale when I was seven or eight - I read the covers off of them.

Later, it was the classics like Hemmingway, Shakespeare, Faulkner, and Poe. I could drink Robert Frost and be filled; consuming Vonnegut was like a three-course meal. I developed a love of poetry and the power of the written word. Writing carried me through difficult adolescent years and into adulthood. Professionally, whatever the job, it was my writing that always paved a way forward.

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I wrote a novel while working graveyard shifts when I was 22 years old - "Rain in the City of Angels". It was a secularized, modern adaptation of the Biblical book of Hosea, only in this story, a telephone psychic (that used to be a thing) fell in love with a phone sex operator. When his world fell apart, he becomes a homeless street prophet until he eventually reunites with the woman whose voice he fell in love with. It was a cute story; it will never be published. After three rejection letters, I thought writing novels just wasn't meant for me.

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In January of 2023, my father passed away. Nearly two decades had passed since that first novel, and I'd made a career out of technical, professional writing in the government sector. But as I looked through a small box of my father's mementos, I realized how few of them meant anything. Belt buckles, pocketknives, union pens - it was all just stuff. They were trinkets that meant the world to him, and I didn't know even one story. Before he passed, I'd tried to convince him to let me document his thoughts on living, dying, cancer, life - everything. For his granddaughters - for their memory of him. He told me he didn't believe he was able to be that vulnerable.

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Several critics have commented that I'm writing for legacy - maybe that's part of it. I think I'm writing for survival; I'm writing to try to put something beautiful and meaningful into a world that is often ugly and struggling for meaning. I write because it is my heartbeat and my breathing in and out. And I'm writing novels because I want to leave my daughter and her future with a trace of something that tells my story, such as it is, for whatever that is worth.