“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner
Who is this guy?
Born and raised in northern Virginia, near DC, I started writing stories beyond school assignments at around thirteen, some kind of crime thriller novel that got abandoned and is thankfully lost forever. By my junior year in high school, I was putting serious effort into writing short fiction, along with movie scripts. I started honing my chops in technical writing with science papers and reports.
I studied chemical engineering, because I had a talent for chemistry and wanted to make things instead of working in a lab. That didn't stop me from writing short stories as a hobby, and it was at Georgia Tech that I found a knack for technical nonfiction. The Army paid my way through Tech as an ROTC cadet. With the recession in 1982, I had a guaranteed job in the Army, and I'd to jail if I didn't take it.
The Army sent me to an infantry battalion in Göppingen, Germany as the new nuclear/biological/chemical warfare guy in Operations. While I didn't write much fiction at the time, I absorbed experiences that led to countless story ideas later. I felt very much at home in southwestern Germany, the hills and mountains and people just like my dad's people in Appalachian Virginia. Consequently, I never lost touch, mail ordering books and music from Bertelsmann-Club for twenty years. Back at Ft McClellan in Anniston, Alabama, my writing was mostly training and doctrinal material with the Chemical School, all part of the job.
After a divorce in 1987 I jumped into fiction again, more short stories, and some novel ideas began taking shape, based on life experiences and a rediscovered appreciation for hardboiled crime and noir stories. I cut my teeth on Mickey Spillane stories before discovering masters like James M Cain and Raymond Chandler. That led to reading Ross Macdonald, Walter Mosely, James Ellroy, and others of that ilk. I learned a lot and the engineer in me led to dismantling those stories to see how they worked.
I had moved to Tampa by then and studying the city's history lead to the happy discovery of Tampa's past with organized crime and corruption. A lot like Chandler's Los Angeles, but with a Cuban and Spanish influence from the immigrants who worked in the cigar industry. From there, the Bob Russel stories emerged, a WWII veteran who left the police for work as a private eye during the last of the Truman years, 1946 - 1952. Dennis Lehane used this setting for his Live by Night.
Also in 1989 I joined the Tampa Writers Alliance and stayed with that group for twenty years. In the Fiction Workshop I learned plenty about storytelling and the craft of writing, and the Nonfiction Workshop taught me plenty about writing magazine articles. During my time with this group I served twice as president.
Instead of just writing process documentation, white papers, and work instructions, I began submitting articles to manufacturing technical journals like SMT Technology, SMTA Journal, and Assembly magazines. In those years I also wrote novels, PUTZMANN'S DESTINY, BOUGHT AND PAID FOR, ILLEGITIMATE, and the beginning of CROSSING THATCHER'S CREEK.
Around that time I began writing articles for Spiegel Online, the German news magazine. I was reading it daily and had become a fan of the einestages section, personal essays with historical significance. I submitted an account of my Cold War Army service: alert exercises, always ready to roll out and execute battle plans if the balloon went up. From there einestages published my articles on 400 years of barbecue, the 1968 riots in Washington, chemical warfare in the days of the Cold War, and the Altmetall (Old Metal) section of automotive published my story of restoring a 1965 Corvair Monza. By then I was a charter member of the DD-214 Writing Group, veterans who got together and workshop writing.
With the help of my DD-214 writing group, I wrote IN THE WEST and got started with BODENSEE, both novels originating as short stories. The characters told me that they had more to say and wouldn't leave alone. With my retirement in 2024, I have more time to devote to these stories and characters.