My life (some 74 years thus far) has been enjoyably haphazard. I've been able to do most of the immature things I wanted to do when I was fourteen. After graduating from university I was, in approximate order: a naval officer specializing in diving and bomb disarming; a newspaper reporter; an intelligence agent living in Germany and Japan; an international sales executive for a Canadian paper conglomerate and then a major U.S. trading company and now a fiction and poetry writer.
I've lived in six countries, visited another seventy five, and speak four languages ( Japanese badly), My free time is misspent fly fishing and shooting.
Along the way I acquired a wife (now forty nine years worth), two children, five grandchildren and an MBA.
I normally write sardonic to dark fantasy and horror stories and literary poetry. but do stray into children's fairy tales and, when there's nothing else to write, literary fiction. A hundred forty of my stories and poems have been published thus far, most also reprinted.
I didn't really begin writing until I was sixty seven, so there's hope for everyone who's legally old. I also have the luxury of not relying on my meager writing income to write what I want to.
On writing: My first drafts stink, always. I rewrite viciously after a few digestive cycles, and, for problem children that no one wants, run the stories through several critique groups until they're literarily acceptable. Fortunately there are enough demented editors that even my weirdest stuff eventually gets picked up.
I work the other side of writing at Bewildering Stories, where I sit on the review board and manage a posse of five review editors. My collected fairy and folk tales, The Witch Made Me Do It was published by Gypsy Shadow Press. A novella The Witches’ Bane was published by World Castle Publishing, and my collected fantasy and horror stories, Capricious Visions was published by Gnome on Pig Press. Currently working on a paranormal/thriller novel tentatively titled The Rule of Chaos.
