“Sometimes the Worst Brings Out the Best in You”
Writing found me in college through a course called Preparatory English or Prep English.
During that course, I wrote a very short story called The Jocular Glasses. It was about a road trip my family had taken to Canada where we had encountered a serious cyclist. He wore a pair of glasses with a side mirror, making the glasses look like a contraption.
I was hooked on writing!
As excited as I was, I was just as sad. One night, I had come home from work and found a Dear John letter left on my pillow.
If I had not been broken-hearted enough.
It was a very white wintry morning months later, snow falling heavily when my now ex-girlfriend called. I thought that maybe she called to say she wanted to get back together. I was wrong. The call was for my sister. My ex had just bought a new car and wanted to ask my sister if she wanted to go for a ride in it. I, of course, was not invited.
I fled to the basement. On my father’s Royal Safari manual typewriter, I began writing away the pain of a broken heart through a short story.
I never completed the short story ASATAL, which was an acronym for A Story About Telepathy and Love. That is when, I believe, I officially became a writer.
I don’t remember ever having stopped writing since that miserable snowy morning. Although in the beginning, I wrote a lot of stories that went nowhere—false starts as the late Paul Auster called them—I became a freight train of a writer!
In 1993, I landed my first official writing job as a writer for The Wolf Traxx Monthly. It was a paper published by WNCD 106 The Wolf, a rock station in Niles, Ohio. I worked there until 1994 when the paper went out of circulation.
In the Summer of 1997, on a wing and a prayer I moved down to Charleston, SC, hoping to write for the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper The Post & Courier. Hope lost, I returned home where I wrote the novella “Condo Joe”—very much inspired by Charleston and Folly Beach’s landmark the Morris Island Lighthouse.
I began thinking that writing fiction was my thing and returned to college with direction and focus. In 2000, I graduated with a smart bomb of a degree in general studies.
By 2004, I wrote two more novellas, thrillers—Jamaican Moon and Bad Blood. They along with Condo Joe were published as a collection called Three by the Sea by a Print-On-Demand publisher.
The first review was in by a dear friend of mine, Rita, from Trinidad, and it was a review that any first-time author could only hope for:
I couldn’t wait any longer, so I bought the book off the Internet—cost me a big $18, shipping, etc., but it was worth every penny. A good book, kept my interest to the end.
Rita thought I ought to be writing for TV, but it was write the Great American Novel or nothing!
I applied to the Institute of Children’s Literature. Writing an essay was part of the application process, and I wrote an essay called “The Unusual Gift” about as a child having been given a unicycle as a Christmas gift. I was accepted. I studied under the author Stephen Roos, and graduated in eighteen months. I wrote two children’s books—Finny the Friendly Shark and Timmy the Timid Dolphin—both published.
In the next couple of years, I tried writing novels until one morning I thought I’d try something completely different—writing a spec screenplay.
That screenplay became Forbidden. I wrote another feature spec This Ain’t No Vacation, Sweetheart.
Attending a local English Festival, I was formally introduced to Karl Kurlander (co-writer of St. Elmo’s Fire). I told him that I had written a couple of screenplays. He suggested that I send a script in for script coverage. I sent in This Ain’t No Vacation, Sweetheart, and in a week was served up a “PASS”.
I bought the book Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting by Syd Field and re-wrote the script. After several rewrites the script earned a “CONSIDER”.
During this time I had been been on a book tour with Books Are Fun where I sold and signed copies of Finny the Friendly Shark and Timmy the Timid Dolphin. Finny the Friendly Shark became the third feature spec script I’d write, which after a re-write or two also earned a “CONSIDER”.
Between 2008 and 2015, I wrote forty-some feature spec scripts and a couple of for-hire scripts.
The genre seem to choose me, and the genre I believe I am permanently planted in—at least for now—is thrillers.
I live in my hometown New Castle, PA, a small city 50 or so miles northwest of Pittsburgh—which also happens to be fireworks capital of the world.