I grew up in New Jersey and began writing in my teens. At 20, I hitchhiked to California and eventually landed a job as West Coast music writer for GQ Scene, an Esquire magazine for teenage boys. Later, I traveled extensively in Mexico and Central and South America, writing for stateside magazines, teaching English as a second language and trying to stay out of the way of drug dealers, revolutionaries and rogue governments. A lot of my fiction is drawn from those days.    In 1992 I started my own business magazine, which I sold six years ago so I could get back to my real love — writing fiction. Georgia Bound was my first effort in this journey. Love and Death in the Tropics, a historical suspense inspired by my own experiences in Nicaragua during the last days of the dictator Anastasio Somoza, will debut soon.