If you want to know about me as a writer, you should check my writing history. If you want to know about me as a programmer, you should check my programming history. This is just the story of me as a guy, and it's probably only useful as a link to toss up on Facebook. In fact, if you're here from Facebook you're probably a high school friend wondering where I disappeared to after graduation, so you can safely skip down to the section labeled "Arkansas" and read from there. If you want to know exactly where I've been and what I've done, though, this is the full account.

Texas
I was born November 9, 1979, in Dodge, KS. I think it snowed. I’m pretty sure Dad stopped to get a hamburger while Mom was in labor at the hospital. Well, I think that was me but it could have been my older sister. Anyway, I’m told the place made the best hamburgers, so it doesn’t bother me any.

Shortly after I was born (a matter of months), my family moved to Texas. We lived in Texas for six years (my early life is all in sixes), and spent at least some portion of that time in an apartment complex that I remember vaguely. My sisters and I spent more than one occasion playing in the trash dumpster (gross), one of my friends stole one of my He-Man action figures, I had a nightmare about a giant shark in the little community swimming pool, and I tore the snot out of my knee acting like an idiot. I still have the scar from that last one.

Oklahoma
In '85 Dad got transferred to Tulsa, OK, where some of my serious memories start, and where most of my shaping happened. We lived for a few months in a rental house in Broken Arrow, before my parents found out about a little farm out in the country. It was in Foyil, OK, which is fifteen minutes outside Claremore (which is thirty minutes outside Tulsa). The farm was fourteen acres of childhood freedom. The house sat on top of a big hillside that ran all the way to the back of the property. That hillside was covered in big, old trees and winding footpaths and great boulders covered in moss. And ponds. There was a little stream that wound its way across the whole of our land (spotted here and there with shallow ponds full of snakes and fish way too small to try to catch). At the bottom of the hill was a great broad pasture (it seemed huge to a six-year-old, anyway) bordered on the far side by shale cliffs ten feet high that melted into a long, low slope up to a smaller pasture where a huge blackberry bush grew and where we tried to start an orchard of fruit trees (which ended up just one very sad apple tree that never had any water). There was also an ancient, immense oak that eventually toppled during a storm and its roots tore up a great chunk of the fence and our sheep wandered over into the neighbor’s land and his cows wandered into ours and for a while that back field was a kinda scary place to be....

I attended Foyil Elementary School where I made my First Grade teacher cry, and had a crush on my Second Grade teacher (Mrs Guebell), and didn’t do any of my math homework through all of Third Grade, and almost skipped from Fourth Grade to Fifth but my parents didn’t want to hurt my social skills. Fifth Grade was Mrs Johns, the first adult I can think of in whom I recognized a real heapin' handful of personality — she was more than a person, she was almost a myth. Then in Sixth Grade we had a football coach for a teacher, and his only real educational high point was math (so I learned nothing from him), but he gave us weekly writing assignments in which we had to include every one of our spelling words for the week in our story, and it had to be a page long. I still have those stories. I think the shortest one I wrote was three pages and the longest was about twelve. And then I wrote a forty-five page fantasy novel (which is, of course, complete garbage, but quite an accomplishment for a twelve-year-old). And I enjoyed writing the little stories — and the encouragement they earned me — so much that I decided to become a writer. I wanted to be a novelist so I could work from my home and my children would always have at least one parent home with them.

We attended the Central Church of Christ (on Blue Starr Road) in Claremore, where Dad eventually became Youth and Family Minister (or maybe it was Assistant Minister, or maybe one and then the other). I had two "school friends," Robert and Kenny, but other than them all my friends were my Sunday School class: Brad, Brandon, Brian, Emily, Josh, and Mandy. There was also a girl from Kansas who joined us just before I moved, but I can’t remember her name right now. Our parents were all the same ages (or close), and we were all the same ages (or close), so we all did stuff together all the time. I remember the whispered scheming that went on Sunday afternoons after service at Western Sizzler, as we children worked out who would ask their parents if which of the other of us might come over for the afternoon.

I remember the time I tried so hard to make us all into an a capella contemporary Christian singing troupe (except I couldn’t sing at all and we were, after all, ten years old, and everyone else had some sort of social life, and...well, it just didn’t work). But we were called "Alive in Christ" and I still have the songbooks I made for us to practice with. I also remember how we were rockin' monsters at Bible Bowl, and how we won every game. One time two people didn’t show up for a competition so Josh and I played an entire tournament as a two-person team (there were usually four to a team) and we took second place at the end of the tournament and our other team took first.

Our house was a way out from Claremore, though, so I spent a lot more time on my own, out exploring through the trees or pushing my way through waist-high grass in the pasture or sitting on Aaron’s Rock and staring down at the humorously misnamed Goldfish Pond (which was heart-shaped) or spending hours watching the sheep. My life was adventure in those days — well, adventure and sheep stink and the occasional whole Saturday spent digging rocks out of the garden or pulling weeds. But other than the work it was adventure, and I learned to live whole lives in my imagination — to pass a whole lifetime in an afternoon, and I think it was the cultivation of a sense of wonder in those fourteen acres that fueled my writing when I finally started making stories.

Kansas
In the summer of my twelfth year my family moved to Wichita, KS. It was a big deal. It was a major change for all of us, and involved a whole lot of weighing and measuring before the decision was made. After a lifetime of moving about, my parents' best friends were in Claremore (many of them still are), and naturally my sisters and I could not adjust well or quickly. I remember thinking my parents hated me, to make me leave all my friends behind. I also remember thinking that we were all going to end up executed in a gang-related drive-by as punishment for moving to The Big City. I had...a somewhat overstated concept of Wichita, clearly.

We had to move quickly, because they wanted Dad as Family Minister as soon as possible. He really impressed them in Wichita, and in fact our family moved very quickly to the heart of the congregation at Westlink. I'm not saying we became instantly important — just that we got entangled really quickly, and after that we were a part of the family, for better or for worse.

I started that fall at Wilbur Middle School, where I got to enroll in a real Honors program and take foreign language classes. That opportunity alone almost made up for the trauma of having to move. I've always had some trouble with social anxiety, though, so I didn't make friends easily or quickly. Michael Storh became a quick confidant and I eventually found my way into the good graces of most of my Honors classmates - Robin Kenyon and Haley Rumback and all that lot. I took French and Latin classes and survived pre-Algebra and Gym. Apart from Creative Writing classes with Mr. Huddleston, I don't have a lot of fond memories of grade school.

I was heavily involved with the youth group at church, though, and I made more friends there. Brad Celestin was one of the first, and then later Dan Wood, and the three of us were inseparable until college dragged our lives in different directions. I also met the lovely Amanda Johnson on a summertime trip to Six Flags in Dallas, and fell instantly in love. I spent months conspiring with her best friend, Trish, to gain her interest. Of course, in the end, I found my real affection lay with the girl I spent so much time with. Trish and I were on-again/off-again for most of high school, but we were engaged by the time we headed off to college.

I could spend a lot more words on my time in high school. I have much clearer memories of it than of my time in Claremore, but the Claremore ones are fonder so I'll let them have the word count.

Arkansas
My dad got a new job in Arkansas in March of my senior year, but convinced them to wait for him until the end of the school year. They were clamoring for him, though, so the night of my graduation I think I went to a big graduation party at my church, then went home and slept on a pallet on the floor. The very next day, I moved to Little Rock.

That was a really unpleasant summer. I'd tried my hardest to convince my parents to let me live in Wichita for the summer, crashing at a friend's place, but they wouldn't have it. So I lived in Little Rock, and ended up getting a job at a temp agency just to save up some cash for books in the fall. I basically blew all that money on trips back to Wichita to see Trish on the weekends, though. It's an 8-hour drive, but I usually made it in 6. I was stupid back then.

Oklahoma Again
Anyway, in August I drove out to Oklahoma City for college. I attended Oklahoma Christian University, a Church of Christ-affiliated private school. There's a handful of those, but this was the only one with a writing degree. All the others offered only Lit degrees in the English department. While I was getting my BA in Writing I took loads of Creative Writing classes and ended up editing the school's literary magazine for a semester.

Dan was there, but he'd already been at college for a year so he had his own crowd. I made some friends in the Honors group, and of course Trish was there, too, and that was basically my whole social circle. By sophomore year I had narrowed that down to about six people...and that's basically my social circle still. Half of them have profile pages on this site.

In my Freshman year I wrote a novel about a dragon-rider and called it Taming Fire. I rewrote it every year I was in college, and submitted it dozens of times to different publishers. Every submission was rejected. For a while after that my dream died.

I did get married to Trish in Spring Break of our Freshman year, and we went to England on a mission trip that summer. The next spring we went to Paris for a week to celebrate our anniversary. So, apart from the rejection letters, it was an exciting year.

When I graduated in 2002 without selling a novel, I had to get a job. The head of the English department put me in touch with a Technical Writer in Tulsa who was looking to expand his department, so I got my first real job writing user manuals for Fish Finders and GPS devices. I was there for three years. I started two more novels, lost forty pounds, and got them back. That was Tulsa.

Then in 2005, Trish got accepted into graduate school at OU, and I got a job offer to work for the FAA (at a significant raise, even), so we left Tulsa behind, moved back to Oklahoma City, and we're still here. I'm writing much more technical stuff now - mostly maintenance materials for long-range radar, very engineery - and of course I don't really get to play with the toys, but the whole work environment is a lot more rewarding.

I'm making good use of my free time these days, too. I've completed half a dozen novels since I graduated. I've learned to program in Python, and made something of a name for myself in a pretty niche community writing scripts for modded XBoxes. I became a father in February 2007, to the adorable Annabelle Grace, and we're expecting Alexander Lewis this fall.

It's going to be a busy fall. I've applied for OU's Master of Professional Writing program, and I just agreed to teach Technical Writing at Oklahoma Christian. I'm also pretty heavily dedicated to National Novel Writing Month, so I don't think I'll be able to get out of that even with everything else going on. That's a snapshot, though, of the direction my life is heading.

There's my story, as of June 2009. Other than that, it's just things and stuff.