Author of Accidents & Incidents
NEW BOOK!
Accidents & Incidents (with Assorted Confessions!) Teeth grinding stories of rod running adventures over the past 30 years and how the author and his brother avoided and escaped heart-stopping highway accidents. Plus assorted confessions from those who felt the need to say: “I’ll never do that again.” Available now!
Dear Friends,
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I was born and raised in the wilds of Iowa… well, back when I was growing up there, playing in the woods, hills and down by the river behind our house certainly seemed like the wilds. Of course, when I reached the magical age of sixteen… the “wilds” got even wilder… with my help. Growing up and going to school in my small hometown is something I have never regretted… there was a lot to learn in a small town - naiveté being one of the greater lessons. I learned a lot in the short seventeen years I lived there.
One of the things learned back then was to take life in short bursts (it took a long time for me to learn that), since then, I never rush into anything and weigh every option carefully… my life, from art school graduation on, took on that kind of lifestyle. I moved form Denison (population then, 4500) to Fremont, Nebraska (population then, approximately 10,000) with a high school friend (took quite a bit of coercion before I committed). Once there, it took several years for me to decide what to do with the rest of my life… I finally settled on art school. On to Omaha (population then approximately 100,000, a huge city compared to the previous) and commercial art school. Upon graduation, I was offered a job at a small ad agency… I accepted and worked there for a while before I realized my future wasn’t going anywhere ( I used to cat-nap in the afternoons, there was nothing for me to do!). The next step was to move to a much larger city… that decision took three months. I finally gave my notice, packed up my ‘64 Impala and moved. I’ve been in Denver, ColoRODo since May, 1966. Suffice to say I’ve never looked back.
All this time, I played with cars… and today, cars are my life… I’ve been playing with them since I was 16… in 2001, when the idea for these stories (Bangin’ Gears & Bustin’ Heads) came about, I’d just completed a fiction writing course and the lesson that stuck in my mind was that old line: “Write what you know.” During the course, I’d gotten an idea for a great novel (Arsenal Code RED) - a thriller about the federal government’s storage area within the city limits of Denver and holding eight million gallons of nerve gasses. As an aside, this is a story about two 15 year-old computer whizzes, among other characters, an airliner crash and a nerve gas heist. I had been working on that story and found the research tedious… I felt I didn’t know the subject well enough… so… in October, 2002, I wrote one automobile related short story about me getting my driver’s license, how it affected me and placed it on a web site I was perusing, it’s called the Jalopy Journal (H.A.M.B pages). The story was met with great enthusiasm… I was stoked. I wrote another, in less than three days… placed it on the site the next Friday nite… gave it a name too… called it The Friday Nite Read (along with a subtitle). The readership grew, the comments became more varied. Did I find a vein? Did I find a group that could relate to my stories? Did I just commit to something? Yes… I was enjoying the notoriety and wrote another… placed it on the board… the comments/replies doubled. I let a Friday nite slide by, nearly everyone on the board wanted to know where the FNR was… I posted another the next Friday and another the next Friday… after thirteen stories I asked board members if they’d had enough… they did not and asked for more. I needed to do something for the site’s owner, since I was using his “bandwidth.” I auctioned off the first 13 stories, assembled in manuscript form and donated the monetary proceeds to him. I wrote more stories and did Friday nights for the next 13 weeks, until April. I decided to quit writing them and concentrate on the novel I wanted to get published. Ending the stories met with such opposition I decided to auction one complete set of 26 stories… with the proceeds again going to the site owner.