I grew up in the New Jersey suburbs in the shadow of New York City until I graduated college and enlisted in the US Navy, where I spent 6 years traveling around the eastern Pacific. I graduated with a Ph.D. in experimental psychology at a small mid-western university. I started writing Shift World as a way of expending my creative energies during graduate school since scientific research is a very dry and tedious pursuit. Now, I work on the Shift World series full time.