I’ve been passionate about airplanes since I was a kid. I was very lucky as a boy – I had nurturing, loving parents, who encouraged any interest their sons’ showed that didn’t include beating the tar out of each other. Which is how I came to get a ride in the copilot’s seat of a 1927 Ford Tri-Motor, an experience that cemented my interest for life. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I was already researching my novels.  I attended college in Florida, then ended up staying for decades. The most enjoyable years were spent living in a hangar at Spruce Creek airport – my roommate was an older, curvaceous Cessna 195. There I wrote my first novel, while engine song from P-51 Mustangs serenaded dogfights burgeoning in my mind. You might say I took up aeronautical writing in self-defense – now, when folks caught me drooling over airplanes for hours, I could tell them I was doing research.  I may be the most undisciplined author since Jack Kerouac. I write slower than a glacier descends a fjord, and my first draft is rougher’n forty-grit sandpaper. Some days, I have trouble stringing four words together. But there are other days when I can’t three-finger type fast enough to keep up with my fevered mind.  I hold an MBA and a Commercial pilot license. I’m a ravenous reader, one who believes that fiction can sometimes tell a more profound truth than history. My debut novel earned a gold medal from the Military Writers Society of America…just in time for my first publisher to go belly-up. So I relocated to California, to lick my wounds and write IN THE WEEDS. 

Gold Medal for Historical Fiction, Military Writers Society of America

Golden Quill Award for Military Fiction, American Authors Association

Master of Business Administration

Commercial pilot license, Instrument rating