Welcome to my new website. I’m excited to have this site to share all my ideas, knowledge and stories with you. I’ll be using it to share all my books (both fiction & non-fiction) as well as some short stories. It’s been a long journey to get to this point as I’ve done creative writing off & on for over 25 years.  So, let me tell you a little bit about myself and how I developed a love of writing.

It all started in high school:

I wasn’t the best student in high school. In fact, English was one of my least favorite subjects. I didn’t realize it at the time (or maybe I didn’t want to admit it), but I enjoyed creative writing assignments. I hated reading books – I didn’t enjoy reading for pleasure until college. But I enjoyed the writing assignments.

My writing in high school always had some sort of paranormal slant to it. I’ve just always had an interest in it. Maybe it was from watching too much Unsolved Mysteries. Or maybe I was just fascinated by life’s mysteries in general. In fact, the shack in Chapter 23 of The Beautiful People is based on a real shack that was in the woods behind the house I lived in from 1984 to 1999. When we first discovered it, I came up with all sorts of stories about it’s origins and events that could have happened there. In high school, I wrote a short story called “The New Folk” about a family that moved into to my neighborhood that had mysterious, creepy powers. The shack played a big part in that story so it’s fitting that it, along with other elements from that story made it into this book.

College took my writing in a different direction:

I truly fell in love with writing in college. I wrote a novel-length story that was loosely based on some events that had happened my sophomore and junior years. The story actually started out as a joke between me, my best friend and girlfriend – all three of us were in the class. I put things in there with the purpose of making them laugh whenever we had to review my story.  But a funny thing happened, I really enjoyed the assignment and dedicated a lot of effort into it.

For my next assignment, I wrote a sequel to it with the intention of making it into a TV show (which is a story in itself). It was funny because other friends wanted to be added to the story so I’d find a way to write them in. I created all sorts of supporting materials such as character bios, even their class schedules. it was fun being immersed in it and I would day dream about the show – of course my friends were playing the characters they were based on. I even created a soundtrack for it.

A few dreams changed everything:

I kept writing throughout my 20’s, but I was in my 30’s when I got the idea for the series that the Beautiful People is a part of. I  borrowed documentaries from the library (this was before Netflix was popular) and was fascinated with conspiracy theory.  These documentaries were fascinating.  I was especially interested in the supernatural and secret societies. This lead to a series of dreams where I pulled elements to create ideas for stories. As I sorted through the ideas and started organizing them, I realized that I had a whole series of potential books to write.

So then I took the steps to start writing and the rest is now history. A few years of #NaNoWriMo produced drafts of the three stories that follow The Beautiful People. You’ll find a lot of foreshadowing in this first book. It’ll give you “ah ha” moments after you read the others. That’s because my goal to give you something new to discover each time you read it. I hope you’ll find that the case.

Well, that’s all for now with this first post. Keep checking back here for more “the story behind the story” posts. You’ll also learn about my experience with writing, publishing, and marketing books. So if you’re a writer, especially a new one, I hope you’ll get some ideas and inspiration to get your work published.