My biography...
I was born in Norfolk NE in 1968. The oldest of four siblings, I went to school in Battle Creek. For the first eight years of school, I went to St. Johns Lutheran School. After graduating there in 1987, I went to Battle Creek High School where I majored in Music and Art. From there I went into the Army, first to Ft Sill Oklahoma for Basic Training and AIT, then to my duty station of Ft. Kobbe in the beautiful republic of Panama.
After serving two years as a field artilleryman along the Canal, I left the country shortly before the U.S. deposed Gen. Manuel Noriega, the country’s leader and came back to Norfolk where I became an Assistant Manager in a national food chain. This job took me all over the state for the next two years, as the company was expanding.
Deciding a career in the service industry was not for me, I opted for a more physically demanding career in manufacturing.
It was during this period, I discovered an overwhelming desire to write. Trying my hand at the craft on my own led to no results, so I signed up for courses through the Institute of Children’s Literature. My instructor was the venerable Helen M Hoover, author of the Winds of Mars, and several other Young Adult novels
I gained my first publishing credit with a poem published in Warrior Poets. Several more followed with this publication and by then, the Age of the Internet had been born. Websites demanded content, and as long as these sites were getting 5000 visits per month, they qualified as professional credits. I was lucky enough to break into nearly half dozen websites, where the slant of the editors was brutal, yet truthful. Within several years, I had amassed most of the publishing credits I have listed and earned a small but fiercely loyal following of fans throughout the world.
Poetry and short stories were fine, but I found these barely satisfied my need for a wider audience. Thus, I began to work earnestly on my first dark fantasy/sword and sorcery novel, Darksteel Destinies.
This book was and still is, the closest series to my heart. Told in a similar narrative vein to Glen Cook’s Black Company series, it tells a tale of betrayal, pathos and theomachy through the eyes of a protagonist who is a former priest turned soldier.
Looking forward to the future, I can envision many things, and many more stories to tell. I will continue the Wildersteel Chronicles, of which Darksteel Destinies is the first. There will be at least seven books, with Lords of the Earth and Fields of Steel the next two in the series. My ArcheoMage series is also outlined for at least three more books. A new series, called The Yggdrassilthane, is also in the works, and consists of several mid length stories, that while separate, constitute an amazing story arc. And surprisingly, a desire to return to short stories has emerged. Baal the Brutal will be my own tribute to both Cook’s Black Company and Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian, since they are the most important influences in my writing. Additionally, the propensity for verse will never leave me. Additional poetry collections following my first, These Old Bones, are in the works, with Binary Blasphemies slated for publication in the coming months.
