About Me

I wrote my first story at the age of eighteen. I had a work/study job at the college computer lab and after completing my tasks of refilling the printer paper and testing the mice I sat down and slipped a three-point-five inch disk into the drive. The Word Perfect screen greeted me with a blinking cursor. Each day I typed a few more paragraphs. I'd been reading R.A. Salvatore, and, not surprisingly, wove a tale of elves, wars, and magic swords. I printed the manuscript on a dot matrix printer, three hole punched it, and slid it into a black binder. The story rode along with five friends in a sixteen-hour road trip to St. Louis, giving me the perfect captive audience. As I lay in a twilight sleep just past midnight, a distant balloon pop jolted me. The buzzing glare of fluorescent lights stung my eyes as the red illuminated letters of the gas station congealed in my vision. I turned my head groggily. Gas pumps. A man’s muffled voice sounded from a distance in front of the windshield. As I focused on it, its origin resolved to a truck driver waving his arms and pointing at our hood. “Get out,” he shouted, “get out of the car!” My gaze followed his finger to our hood. At first it was hard to see, like a trick of light, but it brightened into candlelight in the hood’s seems. The camera of my life dollied into a tight close up as my eyes widened. The car is on fire. Panic washed over us and the car devolved into a pushing mess. As we spilt out, flames broke free and we scattered to the convenience store. “The keys!” one of us yelled. I spun to see him standing beside the car that was now the campfire that was about to ignite the gas pumps. I searched for to the driver. She stood halfway in the convenience store doorway fumbling in her pockets. Retrieving the keys, she wound up like a major league pitcher and chucked them high. They sailed overhead in a glittering arc against the night’s void and landed with a clink on the station’s canopy. As the intended recipient held his head in dismal, another rider charged in past the driver and fetched extinguishers from a stunned clerk. Our extinguishers spat fog at the fire and as we depleted the last extinguisher sirens howled in the darkness as a line of red flashing lights snaked down the country road. Fire trucks wheeled in and our own personal action movie unfolded, firefighters spilling out, hoses unfurling as water streams engaged the blaze. The car fought back, the engine’s flames bursting into the car’s cabin. Whoosh. Fireballs rollicked from both sides of the car tumbling into ashen clouds. It was the type of special effect reserved for big budget cinema but here, as I recoiled from the heat of the fireball roasting my cheeks, it was quite real. The car’s tires burst in rapid sequence and rocked the vehicle. When the firefighters dropped their hoses and ran, I thought, so should we, but before I could take flight one of the firefighters climbed in his truck, revved the engine, and the firetruck lurched forward to crunch into the Monte Carlo’s bumper. Sparks skittered from locked rims as the car was rammed clear of the pumps. In the distance, a cavalcade of flashing lights announced the arrival of the calvary, and in the blink of a smoke-stung eye a dozen firetrucks, paramedic units, and support vehicles swarmed the station. Multiple water streams engaged the inferno and it withered under the assault, We stood there in shock, the steaming metal skeleton of the Monte Carlo cooling in the parking lot’s corner as paramedics interviewed us, the world a muffled din of idling truck engines and strobing lights. Three hundred miles. We were stranded three hundred miles from home. No one was hurt, but there was one casualty. My story sat in the backseat.

I tried not to think of this as a sign.

But there was still the computer lab, and the blinking white cursor, and stories to be written. They weren't very good, but I had fun writing them. I submitted a few to magazines, and like most starting writers, got the polite rejection notes. I completed my degree in mechanical engineering and went on to become an engineer, a husband, a father. The stories took a back seat as life churned on.

One of the perks of being a dad is that you get to tell many stories. Not just stories that you read, but stories you create. Each night when I tuck my daughter in to bed, I say, "What should our story be tonight?". She gives me the setting, "A little girl and a cupcake factory that's gone crazy." It's a little like a Whose Line is it Anyway sketch, creating the scene on the spot.

And it makes me think of that blinking cursor, and all of those stories I wanted to tell.

So, I opened my laptop and started pecking away. Technology has changed since those three-and-a-half inch disk days, and now I can independently publish. I'm stepping up to the plate, taking a swing at the ball, and seeing how far I can run.