The child of hippie adventurer parents, I lived on my father’s sailboat, an island off the coast of Costa Rica, a converted school bus, and a ramshackle house in Ft. Lauderdale with a leaky roof and a sand yard, before settling down to something resembling a normal childhood. Something in all that made me decide to enlist and serve in the United States Air Force, and then earn a bachelor’s degree in history and an MBA. I worked in accounting and finance from the early 1990s until 2014, but I've since made the leap to full time writer.