Growing up in the Pacific Northwest it's common to become a jack of all trades. By that standard one could say that my formative years were common, though they were anything but.
      My first major interest (besides comic books) was music. Through grade school I played alto sax in the school band, then in high school I played in the school jazz band as well. I also liked chess, and often played at the local coffeehouse.
      After high school I joined the Navy where I worked as a propulsion plant operator, specializing in shipboard firefighting and safety equipment and procedures.
      Following my enlistment I took classes at a few junior colleges, changing my major from Astrophysics to Landscape Architecture and everything inbetween. This resulted in an overabundance of general education units, a few of note being Archeology, Forensic Anthropology, and an Astronomy Lab that took place high in the Sierra Nevadas.
      In my 20's I continued with music, learning guitar and piano, and was fortunate enough to record a few tracks on a rock album I play piano, keyboard, and organ on tracks 3, 12, and 13.
      In 2010 I was accepted into Sonoma State University where I studied computer science, specializing in Optical Character Recognition (OCR). In 2013 I represented Sonoma State University at the 27th Annual California State University Student Research Competition in the area of Computer Science and Engineering.


      In 2014 I became enamored with the writing of R.A. Salvatore. I read the first two trilogies in the Dark Elf series, which inspired me to attempt to write a fantasy novel. Over the next 2.5 years my outline grew into a series of manuscripts, called the Fairytales trilogy.
      The rough draft for book 1, Shadowsbane, was written almost entirely with pen and paper, and fills three 8x11 notepads. Book 1 is 96,000 words in length, which is 4,000 words less than what I have read is the ideal length for one's first novel to be. Shadowsbane took 6 months to write, rewrite, and edit.
      Book 2 was sort of an afterthought of book 1, born of a collection of ideas I had while editing. Early in the rough draft I outlined a tetralogy, then decided to combine the outlines for books 2 and 3, which resulted in book 2 becoming significantly longer than book 1, at 125,000 words.
      Book 2 took 5 months to write. It has the longest manuscript, and took the fewest number of months to finish, which created a situation where I perpetually felt like I couldn't write fast enough, for fear that the collection of ideas would fade from memory. I wanted to write it exactly as I saw it in my mind, not transcribed from notes and assisted by memory. Each time you transpose an idea to another medium it loses a bit of itself in the tranference, like the essence of a dialogue in the game Telephone, or the quality of a video when you change it's format.
      Book 3 brings the characters created in books 1 and 2 together, and is quite large in scale. I took a break between books 2 and 3, and after I began the rough draft for book 3 I found I was able to conceptualize a broader range of characters than I had during the rough draft phases of books 1 and 2, and compartmentalize their sub-plots within a grander scheme. Book 3 isn't nearly as complex as the works of George R.R. Martin, but is on a higher level of complexity than the previous two books in the Fairytales trilogy. Book 3 is 113,000 words in length, and took 1 year from inception to conclusion.

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