All my life I have enjoyed writing. Well, almost all: for my first three years in Dothan, Alabama, and during my childhood years in Birmingham, Alabama and Whittier, California I didn't write. It wasn't until we moved to St. Petersburg, Florida in 1958, when I was a student at Tyrone and Azalea Junior High Schools and Boca Ciega High (class of 1967), that I started writing fiction.
     Why I never seriously considered going into writing as a profession, I don't know. I did take Mrs. Selby's Journalism course at Bogie, and served as reporter for the Hi-Tide, the school newspaper. But in college at SPJC then Birmingham-Southern, my major was art. When during my junior year at BSC it dawned on me that I wasn't wild about the career fields open to art majors, why I did not then consider writing as a career, I have no idea. Birmingham-Southern offered courses in creative writing, taught by excellent professors, but I never took any of them. Instead I opted to graduate in art then study architecture at Auburn University, an irony in that math was always my hardest subject, yet becoming an architect required quite a bit of it.
     When my Dad died in 1988, I did a lot of thinking about his life and what he had accomplished, and about my own life and what I wanted to accomplish. I was still writing, that was a continuing thread through the years. But up to then I had never written seriously. On-and-off writing produced a drawer full of story starts, some of them rather intriguing, but no finished manuscripts, only a few short stories of questionable publishability. I decided that if ever I was going to do anything with my writing, at age 49 I'd better damn well do it.
     Around this same time I had been feeling increasingly disillusioned with the professional practice of architecture. My disillusionment was a multi-headed hydra, and I won't bore you with the details. Suffice it to say if I couldn't be Frank Lloyd Wright, what was the point? I decided I'd take a sabbatical, a break from architecture to concentrate on my writing and see if I could get published. Around this time I began attending the annual Writing Today conferences at my old alma mater, Birmingham-Southern.
     Flattered by the attention I had so long denied her, my Muse responded enthusiastically: I actually started finishing stories! I began submitting the best ones to various markets, resulting in the publication of my short story "The Headsman's Ax" in the Summer 1994 issue of Random Realities, a small circulation magazine of speculative fiction published out of Norcross, Georgia. Not long after that my novella "In the Temple of a Savage God" received an Honorable Mention in the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest. Not long after that, I got involved in the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Workshop, which matched me up with a writing partner, Steve Brendza of Hesperia, California. This matchup led to a friendship that endures to this day, and at least a dozen stories written in collaboration. (Alas, none of these have been published. Yet.)
     Today, I persevere. My novel Marijuana is completed, ready for readers. A collection of shorter works with a unifying thread, entitled The Sight (which contains, among other things, "In the Temple of a Savage God"), is also ready. Several other novel-length works are in production. I hope you will get a chance to read them, and I hope you will like them.