By day, I'm a mild-mannered employee of a company that does stuff that isn't really all that much your business. (Nothing personal.) By night, I write novels. And sleep. And sometimes waste time checking Twitter and sports updates. Okay, a lot of the time. I admit it. I could have written 10 more books by now if I didn't spend so much time reading all the latest Premier League transfer rumors.
That's it in the old proverbial nutshell. But just in case you're looking to write a feature story on me for the New York Times or the West Bumblefuck Penny Saver, here's a little more detail ...
I grew up in Seattle, spent nearly 10 years in North Carolina, and
have lived in Rochester, N.Y., since 2001. Graduated from North Carolina
State University in 1993. While in school I worked for the Bulls for
three years and started at Baseball America as an intern. That
blossomed into a full-time position when I graduated, and I worked for
BA for six years total in two separate stints (three if you count the
summer I spent filing photos and cutting clippings out of newspapers,
back before the age of the internet).
In between BA tours of duty, I returned to Seattle for three years,
where I temped (full-time for 2 1/2 years solid) at Microsoft and
coached 13-year-olds in Little League for three seasons. Our second team
finished second in the state, one win away from winning the tournament
and qualifying for regionals in Montana. It was during these years that I
began to write fiction, pumping out the first draft of a truly horrible
novel, which I am embarrassed to read now.
I began working on The Greatest Show on Dirt in 2006. It
morphed quite a bit through several major revisions since then, finally
setting in its current state four years later. (My son was born in 2009,
which did interrupt progress for a bit.)
My second novel, Nine Bucks a Pound, was released in
February 2014. This is also a baseball novel, about an overlooked minor
leaguer who breaks through after succumbing to the lure of steroids and
must later deal with the consequences when his secret is exposed. I published my third novel, Sorry I Wasn't What You Needed, in May 2015. This one is a family drama that has nothing whatsoever to do with baseball.
Continuing in the family vein, I released The First World Problems of Jason Van Otterloo (2018) and Dispatches from a Tourist Trap (2019). These are books 1 and 2 in a trilogy. The third book has yet to be written. (I'll get to it, promise.) In the meanwhile. I'm working on my sixth book, which will be closer in style to Sorry.
