ABOUT ME

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I live with my wife (and best friend) Patty, near Saratoga Springs, NY, in the heart of a beautiful patch of country--close to the Adirondacks, the Berkshires, and the Taconic Range; three hours from NYC, Boston, the south shore of Rhode Island, and Montreal. Patty and I love to head for the woods (or the shore) with our camper hitched up to the trusty Subaru, and the old red canoe strapped down on the car top. I I love the water--whether it's the crashing roar of the ocean, a river cascading over rocks, or just the calm stillness of a lake at sunset. It lifts my soul, fills my heart with joy, and puts a smile on my face.

 

I graduated (a long time ago) from Berry College in Rome, GA  with a BA degree (double major, English Lit and French). Immediately realizing that this qualified me for little except unemployment benefits, I embarked on a whirlwind tour of the working world which has included stints as a bank operations manager, copy center manager, and retail sales manager. (See a pattern here?  Those that can't, teach. Those that can't teach, manage).  Until recently, I worked as the team lead for an eclectic group of database content editors at a global information technology firm. How's that for corporate doublespeak? I managed to retire at the end of January 2024, and am now no longer getting paid. So I really hope this writing gig takes off...

 

I have always been a devourer of books, with a varied taste in genre: anything from sci-fi (Heinlein and Asimov were favorites of my youth) to classic mysteries (Stout, Christie) to the wacky, whimsical world of P.G. Wodehouse. My early exposure to fantasy was limited to T.H. White's The Once and Future King,. I wore out the pages on that book with re-reading. But it wasn't until I was recovering from a bout of mono after my first semester of college that someone gave me a set of Tolkien. I went through those books like a starving man goes through an all-you-can-eat buffet. Then I went back and started all over again. I forgot that I was supposed to be sick. Who has time to be sick, when you're fighting your way through to Rivendell, or on the trail of the Hobbits with Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas? Or riding down with Rohan to the delivery of Minas Tirith? (Ok, I'll fess up--I've always found the subplots of TLOR more entertaining than the main story-line. I'm weird that way, I guess...).

 

But it wasn't just the characters of LOTR,or the creation of Middle-Earth, that had me spellbound. It was the way Tolkien used language. I think that was what stuck with me so much over the years, and eventually prompted me to try writing myself. Oh, I had always written 'stuff', generally just throw-away pieces done to amuse my friends. But Tolkien opened up vistas for me that I had only dimly imagined, inspired me to listen to those people that were wandering around in my head muttering, and to begin to write down what they said.

 

With that in mind, I finally decided that I had interesting stories I wanted to tell, and a decent enough grasp of the language to be able to tell them. I don't feel I have anything earth-shattering to say. My goal is to entertain--to provide light, fun, fast-paced stories that can be polished off over the course of a rainy Sunday afternoon and leave the reader smiling and wanting to visit that world, those characters again, to see what they may be up to now.

 

I am a member of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association and Hudson Valley Writers Guild. You can find me on Threads and Facebook (see the Follow Me links below).

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My debut novel Traitor Knight  was released on September 7, 2015 by Champagne Books. Desperate Knight, the second volume in the series, was released on August 7, 2017. The third book, Enchanted Knight, was released on April 13, 2020. The latest installment in the series, Stolen Knight, was released on July 4, 2022. I've just turned in Book Five (Fateful Knight), and hope to release it this fall. I'm also working on Book Six (tentative title Mystic Knight), and I have a dragon's horde of short stories from the Kilbourne universe that I hope to collect into an anthology soon.

 

I hope you'll visit the rest of this site, to see the kinds of stories I tell. And I hope you'll let me know what you think of them.

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