When I was ten a drunken guy almost drowned me in a swimming pool. It was in Miami Beach at the Chateau motel. The guy was a pool hand and he was wrestling (playfully, for the most part)with us kids. Then he said, "I'm going to show you a good hold" and he got me in a headlock and took me under. It was a good hold all right. He held me there and held me there and held me there. I struggled but this was a powerful man. There was nothing to do. I would either die or I wouldn't.   That experience gave me an appreciation for life's tenuousness. If you think about it, we're only alive as far as our next breath will take us. So I write novels and stories about characters like you and me with their heads underwater. (Figuratively speaking of course.) Characters under so much duress their brains are about to burst. They're at the end of it all. No way out of this one.   But I also write with a sense of humor. (You have to have a sense of humor, right?) And some of my books are just flat-out funny. I think anyway. :) I was born in 1956 in Chicago. A lifelong Illinois guy. Married once. Divorced. No kids. No pets. Passionate about things: people, classical music, golf. And I always seem to be on the side of the underdog.

Achievement: still alive. Certified at making clutch putts. Awarded international proficiency in sarcasm (1998).