To be perfectly honest, I never intended to be a writer. I wrote some godawful stuff in high school after seeing the modern opera 'The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe'... I'd be embarrassed to even keep it lying around the house nowadays. At the University of Chicago myself and three compadres founded a conservative journal of thought, the Chicago Criterion. Oddly, of the 20 or so of us on staff there was only one Republican. I filled in the back page with satire, trying my best to be as original as humanly possible --I am proud of my Ask Satan advice column, Conspiracy Horoscopes and Jack Kemp's Beat Corner, which no longer exists, anywhere-- but dropped out of the Religion program there twice for lack of funds. I spent the next 7-8 years going from corporate job to corporate job until I walked off and became a ballroom dance instructor. From there, I joined Sandunga, a mambo dance group, and I finally found my inspiration: groups. Without that crazy ever-revolving revolutionary pack of wild Puerto Ricans, I would probably be the blandest, most self-absorbed sunvabish you've ever met. Sandunga gave me purpose and direction and drive. Far more than any schooling or other overrated institution. On Valentine's Day 2006 I joined up with internet news revolutionaries Texasgigs, soon to become Pegasus News. I worked there for free for a year and a half, putting a toe in the waters of music and film criticism. I started my weekly hockey column Thursday Morning Cupcheck the next year and have written every week with just three interruptions since, honing my satirist chops and learning what it really meant to pull a 2000-word quality, original article out of your tuckus on a regular deadline. In Dec. 2010 I finally caved in an read George RR Martin's Game of Thrones, and was so inspired that I tried my hand at fiction for the first time since high school. The result was EXMORTUS: TOWERS OF DAWN, written in a month and edited and revised over seven more. I sent out queries to 44 fantasy agents and got nothing but form rejections --and found out most legacy fantasy publishers are going the way of the dinosaurs anyways-- and decided to self-publish, throwing up three supernatural short stories in two weeks to fluff out my resume. At least until the other four novels swimming around in my head are finally written down in stone.

In 1991 I won second place in a poetry contest I never even entered. Even more mysterious: I had only written one poem in my life at that time, as an English assignment earlier that week. But hey, the trophy had my name on it and everything! Sweet!