I was born pigeon-toed in Evansville, Indiana in 1973, corrected thanks to baby shoes joined by a metal brace. Life in an airline family saw me growing up in Virginia Beach and eventually the Kansas City area, where I still reside. In the gifted program at age 10, I was giving half-hour multimedia presentations and sweeping spelling bees. Early career aspirations vacillated between psychiatrist and pro baseball player. At 13, I picked up the electric guitar. With no lessons and despite limited music-reading ability, I was blessed with good ears and cooperative-enough fingers to play most songs, and was later bestowed my school’s Louis Armstrong Jazz Award. A couple of years earlier, I’d begun tinkering with synthesizer, and though playing piano remains one of my greatest joys, I never did learn it properly.
While earning a degree in Broadcasting from Northwest Missouri State, I began my career by producing radio commercials and jocking shows from alt-rock to classical, jazz, and news at an NPR affiliate. I would go on to build and continuously refine a home project studio for music and audio production while performing in many live bands over the years, from the modern rock of Furley to top regional ’80s tribute group Molly’s Crush, then an acoustic duo called Winebox. In 2015 I released Finding the Light, an album of all-original music I wrote, performed, recorded, and mixed. Then I created an album-length score of electronica for the horror podcast Larkspur Underground. In 2017, we attempted to reform Winebox as a four-piece. >MUSIC
After college, six years spent at a small agency—inside a subterranean limestone cave—exposed me to the full range of video production, from event/wedding videos to TV commercials, multi-cam live events to product demos. Industrials, mostly. I had to master each phase of production myself, often single-handedly creating videos end-to-end. After many projects proofing ad copy and preflighting print jobs, I took on those tasks myself, splitting time between video work, copy writing, and graphic design. This diversity of skills prepared me for my most recent position at a major telecom company, where I directed, shot, and edited training/communications videos, as well as providing voice work, animation, and other project management duties. My short film parody Featurette screened at several festivals and served as a calling card of sorts. I have done a fair amount of freelance design as well as teaching Photoshop workshops. >VISUALS
A renewed interest in reading fiction around the turn of the century gave me the writing bug also. I’d been comfortable writing screenplays, ad copy, and song lyrics, but now found the power of visceral long-form prose irresistible. So began a tedious four years crafting and publishing my first novel, Major Inversions. During this time, I immersed myself in online writing communities and workshops, attending lit events and conferences while developing a large peer network of creatives whom I count among my most-treasured friends today. This also led to editing work on perhaps a dozen published novels. In addition to many short stories in various genres, I published my second novel, Flashover, in 2012, following that up with a collection of stories and poetry called Submission Windows, then a self-produced audiobook edition of Major Inversions. With fellow author Caleb J Ross, I produced and co-hosted 57 episodes of Important Question? Podcast where we debated absurd topics with wit and irreverence. WRITING
