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He grew up in the Midwest where the land is flat and the corn is tall. The winters are bleak and cold. He hated winters.

He always wanted to write. But writing was hard. And he wasn’t very disciplined. The cold had nothing to do with that, but it didn’t help. That changed in grad school.

After several attempts at a proposal, his major advisor was losing money on red ink and advised him to figure it out. Somehow, he did.

After grad school, he and his wife and two very little children moved to the South in Charleston, South Carolina where the winters are spring and the summers are a sauna (cliche but dead on accurate). That’s when he started teaching and writing articles for trade magazines. He eventually published two textbooks on landscape design. He then transitioned to writing a column for the Post and Courier. They were all great gigs, but they weren’t fiction.

That was a few years later.

His daughter started reading before she could read, pretending she knew the words in books she propped on her lap. His son was a different story. In an attempt to change that, he began writing a story with him. They made up a character, gave him a name, and something to do. As with much of parenting, it did not go as planned. But the character got stuck in his head.

He wanted out.

A few years later, Socket Greeny was born. It was a science fiction trilogy that was gritty and thoughtful. That was 2005.

He has been practicing Zen since he was 23 years old. A daily meditator, he wants to instill something meaningful in his stories that appeals to a young adult crowd as well as adult. Think Hunger Games. He hadn’t planned to write fiction, didn’t even know if he had anymore stories in him after Socket Greeny.

Turns out he did.