Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
Born in 1965, I grew up on a working cattle ranch in the desert thirty miles from Wickenburg, Arizona, which at that time was exactly the middle of nowhere. Work, cactus and heat were plentiful, forms of recreation were not. The TV got two channels when it wanted to, and only in the evening after someone hand cranked the balky diesel generator to life. All of which meant that my primary form of escape was reading.
At 18 I escaped to Tucson where I attended the University of Arizona. A number of fruitless attempts at productive majors followed, none of which stuck. Discovering I liked writing, I tried journalism two separate times, but had to drop it when I realized that I had no intention of conducting interviews with actual people but preferred simply making them up.
After graduating with a degree in Creative Writing in 1989, I backpacked Europe with a friend and caught the travel bug. With no meaningful job prospects, I hitchhiked around the U.S. for a while then went back to school to learn to be a high school English teacher. I got a teaching job right out of school in the middle of the year. The job lasted exactly one semester, or until I received my summer pay and realized I actually had money to continue backpacking.
The next stop was Australia, where I hoped to spend six months, working wherever I could, then a few months in New Zealand and the South Pacific Islands. However, my plans changed irrevocably when I met a lovely Swiss woman, Claudia, in Alice Springs. Undoubtedly swept away by my lack of a job or real future, she agreed to allow me to follow her back to Switzerland where, a few months later, she gave up her job to continue traveling with me. Over the next couple years we backpacked the U.S., Eastern Europe and Australia/New Zealand, before marrying and settling in the mountains of Colorado, in a small town called Salida.
In Colorado we starved and froze, started our own electronics business, and had a couple of sons, Dylan and Daniel. In 2005 we shut the business down and moved back to Tucson.
Through all this I have continued to write. My first six books, which included a fantasy trilogy, a science thriller and a horror novel, admittedly weren’t all that good, but I learned a lot from writing them (many years ago I read some advice Stephen King gave to young writers, something to the effect that you’ll write a million words of crap before anything really good comes out and, in my case at least, it was true).
Anyway, somewhere in the mid-2000s it all finally started to click. My characters and scenes just started to come alive. Since then I have written an epic fantasy series, The Devastation Wars, and am just wrapping up the fifth and final book. I’ve written the action thriller Watching the End of the World, and I’m writing a book about growing up on a cattle ranch.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
Watching the End of the World is the name of my latest book (although I have a new one, book five in my fantasy series, which will come out very soon).
Spoiler Alert!
This story was born somewhere around 2011. My son, Dylan, was watching a reality show that was set in a warehouse in LA. The premise of the show was that civilization had collapsed and the participants had to find ways to filter water, collect food and so on. It was actually rather interesting watching the participants figure out how to use what was available to meet their needs. But it turned silly when they were “raided” by motorcycle-riding hooligans and had to “fight” them off. Clearly everyone knew it was fake so there was no real dramatic tension. At one point I turned to Dylan and said, “Wouldn’t it be awesome if those people actually thought the world had ended?”
That sparked a discussion as to whether such a feat could be pulled off. Since my sons and I have always enjoyed debating post-apocalyptic scenarios, this became a favorite topic over the next couple years. (Hint: Don’t watch a zombie movie with us. We spend half the time on pause talking about what the characters should have done in every situation.)
What authors, or books have influenced you?
Way too many to do real justice. Edgar Allen Poe, Stephen King, Steven Ericksen, Matt Stover, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Louis Lamour, Stephen Donaldson, JRR Tolkien.
What are you working on now?
I am finishing up my fantasy series, The Devastation Wars, and writing a book about growing up on a ranch, which will be largely humorous.
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