Having migrated from South Jersey with my wife, Carol, and our daughters, Meg and Kate, fifteen years ago, we remain in Newport, Rhode Island, firmly anchored in our adopted home town. The exotic specimens of trees, which sea captains brought to the island (Aquidneck) throughout the years, are constant sources of fascination, frequent implants in my works of fiction.

I began writing fiction when I was eleven years old. The notion - "suspension of disbelief" - was utterly foreign.

At Stockton State College, I acquired a degree in literature (graduating summa cum laude - perhaps at the top of my class, though I never bothered to find out). Afterwards I attended Penn State University in State College, PA, pursuing a degree in comparative literature (but, alas[!] funds ran out).
I so loved driving through the "Seven Mountains" outside of State College that I mention it in Finding Christmasville.

For twenty years I was employed as a controller/director in hotels and casinos(including eight years with the Trump Organization in Atlantic City and four years at Mohegan Sun in Connecticut). 
For several years, I winged it as a consultant with long-range clients - the Atlantis property on Paradise Island in the Bahamas, a restaurant chain in Atlanta, GA, etc. OK - enough.

In 2004 I started writing fiction again, steadfast in my determination to complete my first novel, Christmasville. The project required four years, writing the novel between 4:00 A.M. and 9:00 A.M. every morning, driving afterwards - on weekdays - the seventy-one miles to a hotel outside of Boston, where I was a hotel controller. The second novel of the trilogy, Finding Christmasville, is slated for publication in December of 2011.  Emperor of the House of Cards, which is a fictional distillation of my experience(s) in the Machiavellan / P.T. Barnum / Franz Kafka / E.M.Esher arena of casinos, will be my third novel and may be published by another interested party. My short story, "The Notion of Zero," appeared in Hopewell Publications' literary anthology BEST NEW WRITING 2007. This story, as well as eleven others and a single one-act play, will be available in the foreseeable future as a literay collection, under the title The Tower of Circular References.

As a final note, I would add two items:
Of all my endeavors and accomplishments, objectives and aspirations - all pale in the immense joy that my daughters bring to my life.
Secondly, the virtues of compassion and humility are grossly under-stated.

Influences (in no particular order): Julio Cortazar, James Joyce, Philip Pullman, Jorge Luis Borges, William Faulkner, Italo Calvino, Claude Simon, Jeanette Winterson, Albert Camus and Jean Genet.  (Globally, I guess that seats me somewhere in the Azores.)