I was raised in the heart of Florida in the 1950s and ’60s, growing up in a pink cinderblock house in a community hemmed by orange groves against the edge of a swamp and the shore of a lake. I didn’t read anything not assigned by a teacher until the summer of 1967, when an injury—the outcome of an idea that looked good at the time—laid me up for several weeks. In an effort to keep me sane my mother brought me armloads of books from the library, which I used to build forts… until the red-and-yellow cover of Have Space Suit, Will Travel lured me into looking inside. To my surprise, I read it—twice—and was hooked. In later years, I read and loved mysteries, fantasies, and historicals, but my reader’s heart first imprinted on YA science fiction.

I left Florida for California in 1973, and wandered a bit before settling on North Carolina’s coast. Along the way I became a husband, a father (three times), and in 2013 a grandfather. I’ve had a half-dozen careers in those forty years, working in education or mental health. These days, when I’m not writing I’m teaching English at a community college.

Oh, did I not mention writing? I began in 1967, right after I started reading, and—if you overlook thousands of rejections and thirty-three years of practice—was an immediate success. Since my first sale in 2000 I’ve sold three novels, a half-dozen novellas, and thirty-one short stories. I’ve also co-written or co-edited nineteen role-players’ resource and rule books.

My writing is fueled by two questions: “What happened?” and “What if?” The first motivates my exploration of lesser-known history, and the second drives my speculations about how our world would be changed if we had chosen differently. From those two streams my stories flow.