I always intended a career in the sciences. One day I was visiting a friend in San Francisco, when I decided to drop in on a game store that I was fond of. Upon exiting the store I met a fellow named Gary Gygax, who stopped me on the way out and began to describe a game he had just created called Dungeons and Dragons. It sounded interesting so I reentered the store and purchased what later became known as the ‘boxed set’, three pamphlets that laid out the foundation for the creation of a fantasy game world. I went home and immediately set about designing my own world. Soon friends from college were meeting at my house every Friday night for fantasy adventure. My first wife, deceased now over forty years, never had an interest in the game, but she used to lie in bed at night and listen to the stories I weaved for my friends in the adjoining room. It was not long before she started insisting that I needed to write. I was a writer she said. I was a scientist I responded. She was persistent, and eventually I began to write short stories as an experiment. Something fascinating happened. I found I not only had a hunger for writing, but I had a very definite opinion on how it should be done. In 1983 my wife drowned in a lake and I immediately stopped writing. Instead I entered teaching, and this is where I spent the next many years of my life. After a time I remarried, had my children and years later decided to leave teaching and move my family out of California. I moved to Idaho, took up life on a small farm, and it is there I began work on The Seed.

The Seed was the book my first wife always wanted me to write. And while the story was weaved afresh, the principle characters came from my game world. As such their personalities were defined over the course of years. As an aside, I later created my own role playing game. I was invited to all the major game conventions to demonstrate it. Consequently the adventures and background of these characters became known and loved by countless people.

As I wrote above I taught science for many years, specifically inorganic chemistry at both the high school and college level. For a time I had intended to pursue a career in molecular genetics, but became disenchanted with the direction of the research, actually it scared the pants off me, and decided to enter teaching instead.  Teaching was the right choice. I love to teach.

Regarding my personal life, I have been married three times. My first wife, Vivian, then the love of my life, died in 1983.  Seven years later I met and married my second wife and had my three children with her. Roughly thirteen years later I was forced to divorce the woman over issues with the children and subsequently won full physical and legal custody of them after a protracted court affair. I then met and married my third wife, Sue, another beautiful lady, and we have been married going on nineteen years- my God the time flies, doesn’t it? And while the children’s birth mother remained in town my third wife, Sue, became their true mother. After my son was killed she adopted my two daughters. Sue is English, and was living in Portsmouth at the time of our meeting employed as an IBM exec. Whatever possessed her to come to Northern Idaho and marry a cranky old American is anyone’s guess. Sue has a fully disabled daughter who lives with us. A real sweetheart of a girl, named Kate.

As to the children, my son was killed by a logging truck on his way into school when he was 18, roughly eleven years ago. He was an amazing boy. One of the most moral men I have ever known- a deeply devoted Christian who was training alongside his best friend to enter the SEALs.  My youngest daughter never recovered from her brother’s death. Emotion was always difficult for her to process and the two were as close as twins. A few years back she took her own life. She was in medical school at the time. My remaining daughter, Sara, has earned degrees in biology, chemistry and a master’s ecology where she specialized in pollinator science. She is working with me to build a bee farm. Actually, if the truth was to be known, she is doing most of the work.

Most of my working career was in education. Before that, while still in school, I worked as a bouncer in a cowboy nightclub. A curious time indeed, as my days were spent in such erudite pursuits as quantum mechanics while my nights involved cracking skulls- a cowboy nightclub can become a very interesting place in a very short order. On the other hand, besides growing up in a rough neighborhood where respect came from one’s prowess with their fists, I was trained in hand to hand combat in military police school where we were given the day off if we could send our adversary to the hospital or at the least knock him unconscious, and we sent folks out on stretchers every time we trained. Then too I wrestled and fenced and was captain of my college saber team where I lead our school to a championship. As a consequence I was good at my job.

Over the course of my life I have had numerous hobbies. As a child I raised and bred tropical fish, and later, as an adolescent teen, I assisted Doctor Lavenberg in his marine lab at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History. Then too I read extensively, averaging a book every one or two days all the years of my youth. My interests ran the gambit from science fiction to classic literature, to science and history. When I was not behind a book one could usually find me in the hills behind our home. The natural world was always my first love and I have spent as much time there as I could possibly manage. There is no greater sense of freedom than to put a pack on one’s back and head off into the wilderness armed with nothing more than a topographical map.

So why write fantasy? I began reading when I was four. Someone had taught me the alphabet, and my mother had been reading to me for several months when, after memorizing the stories she read word for word, I decided to pick up a book and read it as an experiment. My parents had invested in a collection of children’s classics meant for much older children and this is where I began. I found I could read, but as the stories were meant for someone much older there were many words I didn’t know. For the first half hour or so of the experiment I ran into my parent’s room to get help with the unknown words. It didn’t take long for my father to run out of patience with this, he was not a patient man to begin with, and he took five minutes out of his busy life to teach me to use a dictionary, whereupon he gave me a paperback dictionary for my personal use. So with a book in front of me and the dictionary to my side I very quickly became a proficient reader, and as the bulk of children’s literature is fantasy, it was at this early point in my life that my love for the genre began.

But why fantasy? Why not science fiction which would appear to be a natural fit? I will have to admit that many sci fi plots have occurred to me over the years. The problem with science, and ultimately with sci fi, is that science assumes a spiritless material universe. On the other hand I believe in a Creator God. All human experience dictates that creation requires a creator. How can the universe itself, home to that experience, dictate anything less? Fantasy, on the other hand, sees life as spiritual. Fantasy is, at its heart, a search for truth. A curious duality as it is also an escape from reality, taking readers to places they could not otherwise get to on their own, and once there providing an experience they never knew to be possible. Fantasy gives the writer freedom to conform the world to his story.

A final note:

 I have lived a life filled with tragedy. For starters I grew up with a psychopath for a father, as mean and ugly a man as I have ever encountered. Then too there was my mother, a codependent drunk. She was a mean drunk. On the other hand, I did have her love at times when she was sober and that meant a great deal. From such a beginning the chances of my forming a successful marriage were, according to popular dogma, next to none. Yet I met and married a beautiful woman and we were deeply in love. Ten years later she drowned in a mountain lake. I pulled her body out of the water and knelt by her side attempting to breathe life back into her, all the while begging her not to leave me there, before help finally arrived and they took her corpse down to a local hospital. That said, I have already written above regarding the issues with my second wife, and the loss of my children.

How does one bare up under such a life? Well for starters I have come to realize that I could not have experienced so much loss if I had not first experienced the gain. My children gave me as much love and respect as any father could hope for. But everyone dies. As parents we naturally pray that our children will outlive us. For one thing it gives a sense of immortality. We suffer under the illusion that life will go on after our demise’, and that our contributions through our family will continue to have significance. But if our science is correct even the universe will die. In the final analysis nothing will remain of our time in this world.

Nothing…

But I do believe in a Creator God and it does give me hope. Someday I will be reunited with those I love. If that is not true then let me ask you this… what is the point? Why do we live if not to love? And by love I am referring to our desire to do our very best for those around us. Love is not lust. It is the yearning to give to others and that begins with our children. Love is eternal. And for this reason I believe that we will never truly die.

These books were an act of love. First and foremost they grew out of my love for my first wife. A woman whose love for me allowed her to see in me what I could not see in myself. Beyond that, they are my gift to the world. I have lived a long life filled with lessons. I have done my best to process those lessons honestly and to come away with understanding and compassion. It is this understanding and compassion that I desire to share. It is this understanding and compassion that has given me hope.

And that there truly is hope my friends this I believe with all of my heart.