If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. - J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye
Holden Caulfield had a point. My first draft for this page evolved into a mini-memoir, over 1600 words of oversharing. Maybe I’ll use it to write a real memoir someday, but for now, I’m keeping this page brief.
I’ve had three careers. After graduating as an English major and then entering film school, I made educational, industrial and documentary films for fifteen years.
Toward the end of that time, I went back to school and earned a doctorate in education. By then I was a parent and primary breadwinner, so I was relived to abandon the free-lance life for a steady job in higher education. Mainly, I helped faculty teach with the new technologies (it’s called “faculty development”), transitioning faculty away from 35mm slides and chalkboards, to Powerpoint and online learning platforms. I wrote grant proposals, scholarly articles, developed educational technology projects and evaluated their effectiveness.
A few years ago, while working my day job helping faculty (a sometime thankless, frustrating job), I decided to follow up on my lifelong dream of becoming a writer. I’d had that dream since middle school, when I won a citywide short story writing contest. I applied to the UH Creative Writing Program and miraculously was admitted – one of only ten students each year – and earned an MFA. I left the day job with no regrets, and now I write fiction and a newsletter, exclusively.
I’ve since published eight short stories. You can find links to them in their online journals on the Published Stories page.
I’ve also written 3 novels and a novella. The first two novels are in what I call a dormant state.
The first, “The Big Middle”, was my thesis project for the MFA. It’s a historical novel about the Lincoln County war, set in 1880s New Mexico. It’s a rip-roaring tale about a hapless Boston scholar who moves to New Mexico for his health, becomes friends with Billy the Kid and works for Governor Lew Wallace, better known as the author of Ben-Hur. It’s been professionally edited and might get self-published some day.
The second novel, called “Finder/Seeker”, is set in 1970s Dallas and Austin. The protagonist is a struggling filmmaker whose wife runs off to join a cult. He pursues her to Mazatlan, Mexico, and on the way joins up with a streetwise ex-Army intelligence officer and his fourteen-year-old sister, both refugees from a fundamentalist religious cult. The three take on the wife’s cult leader, a charismatic New Age psychologist who is involved with shadowy backers. Madness ensues.
The third is provisionally entitled “Galveston: A Novel”. In my somewhat naive opinion, it has the best chance of publishing success because of its mystery-suspense-thriller genre elements. See a fuller description in Current Projects.
Last year I took a break revising Galveston to write a short story, called “The Reenactors,” which evolved into a fourth novel. It’s also described in Current Projects.
