About Me

I wrote my first story at the age of eighteen. I had a work/study job at the college computer lab, and, after completing all of my tasks of refilling the printer paper and testing the mice, I sat down and slipped a three-point-five inch disk into the drive. The Word Perfect screen greeted me with a blinking cursor, waiting. Each day I typed out a few more paragraphs, maybe a scene. I'd been reading R.A. Salvatore, and, not surprisingly, wove a tale of elves, wars, and magic swords. I printed the three hundred page manuscript on a dot matrix printer, three hole punched it, and slid it into a black binder. The story rode along with me and five friends in a sixteen-hour road trip to St. Louis, giving me the perfect captive audience for reading my first draft. As I lay in the twilight sleep one experiences while nodding off sometime past midnight, a muffled pop, like a distant balloon rupture, jolted me. The buzzing glare of fluorescent lights stung my eyes as the red illuminated letters of the gas station congealed. I turned my head groggily to the left. Gas pumps. I looked straight ahead. A truck driver waving his arms, yelling. “Get out!” he shouted, pointing at our hood. My gaze followed his finger. At first it was hard to see, like a trick of light, but it brightened, candle light in the hood’s seems. Panic washed over us and the car devolved into a pushing mess. As we spilt out, flames broke free of the seams and we scattered towards the convenience store. “The keys!” one of us yelled behind me, and I whirled around. He stood by the car that was now the campfire crackling beside the gas pumps. My eyes darted back to the car’s driver, who was halfway in the convenience store doorway. The driver fished in her pockets, fetched the keys, wound up like a major league pitcher and chucked them high. I watched their glittering arc sail into the night’s void to land with a click on the station’s canopy. As the intended recipient held his head in dismal, another charged in past the driver and fetched extinguishers from a stunned mini-mart clerk. Our extinguishers spat fog at the fire, but It was like spritzing an inferno. As we depleted the last extinguisher, sirens howled in the darkness as a line of red flashing lights snaked down the country road. Fire trucks wheeled in and our own personal action movie unfurled as firefighters spilled out of them, unfurled hoses, and laid down streams on the blaze. The car fought back, the engine’s flames bursting into the car’s cabin and, with a whoosh, a fireball billowed out of the windows. The car’s tires burst in rapid sequence like a controlled charge, rocking the vehicle. When the firefighters dropped their hoses and ran, I thought, so should we, but one of the fleeing firefighters climbed in his truck, revved the engine, and the firetruck lurched forward and crunched into the back of the Monte Carlo, ramming it clear of the gas pumps. In the distance, a cavalcade of red and white flashing lights announced the arrival of the calvary, and in the blink of a smoke-stung eye a dozen firetrucks, paramedic units, and support vehicles swarmed the station. Their combined efforts overwhelmed the inferno, We stood there in shock, the steaming metal skeleton of the Monte Carlo cooling in the parking lot’s corner as paramedics interviewed us, the world a muffled din of idling truck engines and strobing lights. Three hundred miles. We were stranded three hundred miles from home. No one was hurt, but there was one casualty. My story sat in the backseat.

I tried not to think of this as a sign.

But there was still the computer lab, and the blinking white cursor, and stories to be written. They weren't very good, but I had fun writing them. I submitted a few to magazines, and like most starting writers, got the polite rejection notes. I completed my degree in mechanical engineering and went on to become an engineer, a husband, a father. The stories took a back seat as life churned on.

One of the perks of being a dad is that you get to tell many stories. Not just stories that you read, but stories you create. Each night when I tuck my daughter in to bed, I say, "What should our story be tonight?". She gives me the setting, "A little girl and a cupcake factory that's gone crazy." It's a little like a Whose Line is it Anyway sketch, creating the scene on the spot.

And it makes me think of that blinking cursor, and all of those stories I wanted to tell.

So, I opened up my laptop and started pecking away. Technology has changed since those three-and-a-half inch disk days, and now I can independently publish. I'm stepping up to the plate, taking a swing at the ball, and seeing how far I can run.