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"I'm going to read a best-seller by you someday."

It was pretty obvious that I was on the "Writer's Path" from an early age, since those words were spoken by my third grade principal.

Oh, there have been some roadblocks along the way, and long stretches where writing just was not the priority it could have been.  But now, with support, and a few short stories published, maybe we'll start talking about that bestseller again, someday.  

Perhaps if I had read different works growing up, things would be different today.  If I had gotten hooked on L. Frank Baum rather than Poe and Lovecraft, for example, then I might crank out a different breed of fiction today.  But the damage has been done, and most of the plots and vignettes that populate my subconscious tend towards the...weird. Mysterious...macabre...maybe even morbid...and sometimes, darkly humorous.

My stories won the annual Momwriter's Halloween Short Story contest in 2005 ("Quill"), 2006 ("Obsession and the 8:15"), and 2009 ("Creele's Halloween").  I was a frequent participant in The Friday Challenge, and even won on a handful of occasions, most notably for "Emissary" and "Shakespeare...With Zombies."

Two of my stories ("First Rule" and "Quill") have been published in Stupefying Stories, an anthology series.  Eight of my essays have been published on Lewrockwell.com.  Most recently, "A Midwinter Night's Brainwashing" appeared in Perchance to Dream, a collection of science fiction stories inspired by Shakespeare.

Thirteen of my spookiest short stories, plus one poem, have been collected together into "Perchance to Scream," available in October 2014.

I am a ten-time serial masochist challenger for NanoWriMo (that's National Novel Writer's Month, for the uninitiated, where your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write a fifty thousand word novel entirely during the month of November).  My attempts have ranged from "barely started" (9000 words, but hey, that was the month our daughter was born), to "respectable" (20000 words, the year the radiator blew), to "almost freaking there" (45000 words in 2009), to one single, solitary success (50,243 words in 2011). There is very little doubt in my mind that I will try again each year.

When I am not inventing worlds to devastate and characters to torment in particularly gruesome ways, I can be found behind a computer (torturing databases in much the same way as those characters) or behind a camera (trying desperately to get family members, pets, and other assorted entities to hold still long enough for the shutter to catch them--which is likely more torturous for me than for them).