NEW BOOK!

Men “well-known” in the rodding industry/hobby were once young… they have stories too… Recollections, Regrets & Random Acts tells the stories of Tex Smith, Gary Meadors, Neal East, Jerry Titus and several more men everyone knows… Available now!

Dear Friends,

Many thanx for pulling up my site… if you’re a first time visitor or if you’ve already read one of my books, then please sign the Guestbook… I like to know where my fans are.

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.

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