Born in L.A. in 1967, I grew up overseas after my father, a petroleum engineer, decided it would be best for the family to move to Saudi Arabia. After that ten years was up, we moved on to Singapore in the Far East, before heading back to Houston, and the great United States. I got to see the world as a youth and it left a lingering impression on the child I was. The world is a vast, complex and balanced system of cycles that humans have upset. I don't know if we were created to live on this planet, or if we evolved from some earlier form of life. I doubt we evolved from apes, however. Great creatures, but if you meet a few up close, you just know that humans are much more advanced beings. Evolution can not explain all of it.

Don't get me wrong, however, while I may believe that humans are more advanced in most things, in humanity we are, more often than not, sadly lacking. The contradictions I've seen in the world just don't compute, to use today's terminology. There is something fundamentally wrong with Earth and its people. A good portion of my poetry is highly critical of Religion. Although I consider it to me more critical of humanity and its need for the "Opiate of the Masses". It's not that I don't believe in God, but that I don't believe in Monotheism. I believe that what is wrong with this world is that we have lost contact with the Gods when we tried to commune with God.

In my personal opinion, monotheism can not work. In fact to dive a bit deeper for you, my eventual fans (I Hope), the situation we have is not really monotheism. I believe the Gods of Christianity, Islam and Judaism are separate and distinct deities. The problem is that we try to acknowledge that they are, actually, the same god. An impossible task for a world that is at one time very large, and in all the ways that matter, a very small rock in a vast universe full of the unknown. While these three major Earth religions try to work together, they fundamentally can't. Because for each of them, the message of God is different. There are similarities, of course, I assume because even Gods would copy what works rather than try to reinvent the wheel. However the form of worship and amount of devotion due to these Gods is distinctly different, and the rewards and punishments vary widely.

And yet, at several points in time, humans were led to believe in three distinctly different and yet very similar religions, and then convinced that the God they worship is actually the same god. I wonder who, out of all the creatures of myth and religion, would gain the most from deceiving humans on this scale and spreading so much chaos and death? I don't want to call him Lucifer, but I suppose its as good a name as any for Evil.

That is what I learned from my childhood and the traveling I did as a young person. Evil exists. More openly in some places, and almost completely hidden in others, but it is there. Lurking, waiting, building its strength and looking for any opportunity to sow chaos, discord and disorder throughout the world and the universe. It manifests itself in myriad different ways, every day, and for whatever reason, humans have come to dismiss the whole issue as nothing more than the "human condition".

BULLSHIT, I say. The Gods will have their due, Earth will pay in blood, as always, and Evil will come out of the shadows and try to devour the earth in a final, Last Chance Battle. Because, despite the evil in this world, and humanity's seeming indifference to it, things are getting better around the world. Slowly, steadily, one step at a time, a few small problems are being taken care of, and the world changes for the better. That's always how you approach large problems, of course, pick a place to start and get busy. When one problem is solved, move on to another. The reason the process is not moving faster, of course, is because there is always someone who objects to the most reasonable of solutions. No solution is perfect, I agree, but if it makes life better for a great number of people, wouldn't it be a good idea to do it, and then refine it so it helps even more? Instead of offering advice on how to make an idea better, many humans just say "no". I wonder which side of the battle those souls who object by saying,  "Wait, it discriminates against this group of people.", without offering an idea that would correct that problem, will end up on when the time comes.

Make no mistake about it, though. That battle is coming. It will be fought by every soul on Earth, and what will be at stake is the universe itself. It may still be thousands of years off, or it could be just around the corner, but it is stalking toward us every day, every hour, every minute and every second. The fact that we can now tell time in microseconds and nanoseconds just means we'll have the most exact time for its beginning than anyone would ever have thought possible thousands of years ago, when they knew it would happen one day.

As you can tell, I fell in love with the Fantasy genre along the way. When I read The Hobbit, I caught a glimpse of something that it took me years to understand. Since then, I have devoured thousands and thousands of pages of Swords, Sorcery, Knights, Dragons and all the other creatures a great Fantasy needs. I have my favorites, of course, but will read almost anything I can get my hands on in the genre. It is the struggle of Good vs Evil that defines the universe. Every story has a "Good Guy" and a "Bad Guy", even if, at first, it is hard to tell which is which. The problem with stories, compared to real life, of course, is that in books and movies the good side always wins.

I don't, however, read exclusively in the fantasy genre. I am a huge fan of military suspense (Dale Brown, Larry Bond, etc.), political suspense (Tom Clancy, Patrick Flynn, etc.), action adventure (Clive Cussler, etc.) and religious suspense (Dan Brown, etc.). The one thing all these different genres have, of course, is a hero or heroine; more usually, of course, both. Usually what I read I consider to be Heroic non-fiction, but I'll explain that comment at another time, and in another way.

In 2003, I married my ex, and moved back to California. After getting divorced, I now live near Oakhurst, CA in the Sierra foothills, where I have changed my life, and now write and submit from The Grind, a great coffee house full of wonderfully supportive people. Drop by for a cup and lets sit down and talk. I want to get to know you.