shadows and stones - an original fiction series of gothic, horror, dark fantasy

Hmmm, I'm not really hip on doing bios, but I figure I can put something here for you.

First off don't be looking for a photo of me cause I won't be putting one up. Honestly, I look nothing like what you are probably expecting - I'm short and fat and fairly normal :). I will put on some photos of other interesting things though, such as the real Roybear (yep, he exists!) and Romany - my dog. (For the record, the vampire came first, but I really liked the name for my dog.)

I've been writing for a pretty long time. The earliest thing I can remember was a book I started writing as a child. It was about a white persian cat that is abandoned and lives feral until someone adopts her. Mercifully the manuscript has disappeared and all I can remember is the name - "Wild Persia". Hey, I was just a little kid, you can't expect massive originality. At least it wasn't a horse story :)

My next foray was the creation of a society of winged wolves. At about this same time I started doing artwork - very bad artwork. Slightly more survives of the wolf story than does of the cat one - but perhaps the most humiliating item is a red plastic notebook which my father must have salvaged from a box of things I was getting rid of. Drawn on the front in indelible black marker is one of the winged wolves. Saturday morning cartoons (not the Japanimation kind) have better artwork than this thing. Every time I see that notebook I cringe, but I just haven't gotten up the nerve to ask my Dad to throw it out yet. I was still a kid when I created that - so I had some excuse for the poor quality.

In my sophomore year in High School I wrote a series of short stories for an English class assignment. We had to write something that used all of the assigned vocabulary words for that week - big thrill eh? My contribution was a series of stories that were about a girl living in a domed city (yes, I was a fan of Logan's Run). Nothing remains of this series except the memory of my teacher saying they were more fun to read than anyone else's stuff.

That same year marked a milestone in my artistic career when my best friend and I combined to do an oral report on the topic of Human Sacrifice in history. Before you think I was a really morbid kid, it was an assignment we were given when studying the story "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson. We were told that visual aides would improve our grades, so since the teacher wouldn't let us sacrifice a classmate on her desk the two of us illustrated the various historical techniques. The drawings were a smashing success - they were all stick figures wearing Nike's and smoking cigarettes. Our teacher kept them and posted them every year when her classes reached that story. Many years later I learned that a parent saw them and complained to the school board that the teacher was promoting Satanism in her classes. I have no idea what happened to our masterpieces after that, but I hope that parent managed to pull their head out of their ass before they suffocated on their own stupidity.

Around graduation I decided I couldn't write about a person I had never seen. I think the earliest seeds of what would become Shadows & Stones started back then, because I had discovered comic books and absolutely flipped over any stories with shape-shifters. Since writing seemed like the easy part I decided to go to art school and learn how to draw. I attended the Colorado Institute of Art and graduated with a degree that has a really long name which can be summed up in two words - Commercial Art. Unfortunately I went to school right at the time when computers were just taking over print media - naturally I learned how to do it the hard way and couldn't get a job. I didn't know enough computers for most, and I was too much of an artist for the others. Go figure.

So, after paying my dues for years, in jobs that ranged from data entry to contract negotiations having and losing my dream job and suffering a layoff, I have finally once again landed a dream job doing graphic artwork as an in-house designer.

As for specifics - I'm stuck living in Arizona again (tooooooo hot), and I'd rather be in Colorado. I am a die-hard Colorado Avalanche hockey fan, which is not easy when you live in AZ, let me tell you. I'm single, and I'm thirtysomething and that's really all I can think of. Like I said before, I'm really rather average :)

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