About Me

I’ve made a living at one time or another as a teacher, a lab technician helping to recover one of Christopher Columbus’s ships, and, for the past 25 years, a professional technical writer and editor.

My first novel, Shadows Burned In, won the 2015 eLite Book Award Gold Medal for Literary Fiction. I've written The SynCorp Saga, which details the corporate takeover of the solar system in the wake of an Earth devastated by climate change with David Bruns. The Lazarus Protocol, the first novel in Series 1, won a 2018 Best Indie Book of the Year Award (ReadFreely). Valhalla Station, the first novel in Series 2, won American Book Fest's 2019 Best Book Award for Science Fiction. 

Among other anthologies, I've also edited and produced the collection Tails of the Apocalypse (2015), which features short stories set in different apocalyptic scenarios with animals as main characters. In 2017, I co-helmed a sequel of sorts, Chronicle Worlds: Tails of Dystopia—a similar collection of animal-centric stories, this time set in various existing dystopian worlds of their authors—with Future Chronicles Series Editor Samuel Peralta. 

I’ve been influenced by writers both modern and classical as influences, notable among them Bernard Cornwell, Stephen King, George R.R. Martin, Toni Morrison, Edgar Allan Poe, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Mark Twain. Other major influences include fellow Texan and singer-songwriter James McMurtry, Groucho Marx, and a little-known comedy troupe from England you’ve probably never heard of named Monty Python. (Python is always happy to have someone shill their name as long as they don’t have to pay for it and might get a chance to sell you something, so there you go, guys. Regards from Texas.)

As far as current reading interests go, I prefer science fiction and fantasy and historical fiction, which you could probably guess from my list of influences. I’m also a die-hard Star Trek fan and prefer Sci-Fi dramas like Battlestar Galactica (the reboot), Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams, Stranger Things, and The Walking Dead when I flip on the tube.