I’ve been passionate about airplanes since I was a kid. I was very lucky as a boy – I had nurturing, loving parents, who encouraged any interest their sons’ showed that didn’t include beating the tar out of each other. Which is how I came to get a ride in the copilot’s seat of a 1927 Ford Tri-Motor, an experience that cemented my interest for life. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I was already researching my novels. I attended college in Florida, then ended up staying for decades. The most enjoyable years were spent living in a hangar at Spruce Creek airport – my roommate was an older, curvaceous Cessna 195. There I wrote my first novel, while engine song from P-51 Mustangs serenaded dogfights burgeoning in my mind. You might say I took up aeronautical writing in self-defense – now, when folks caught me drooling over airplanes for hours, I could tell them I was doing research. I may be the most undisciplined author since Jack Kerouac. I write slower than a glacier descends a fjord, and my first draft is rougher’n forty-grit sandpaper. Some days, I have trouble stringing four words together. But there are other days when I can’t three-finger type fast enough to keep up with my fevered mind. I hold an MBA and a Commercial pilot license. I’m a ravenous reader, one who believes that fiction can sometimes tell a more profound truth than history. My debut novel earned a gold medal from the Military Writers Society of America…just in time for my first publisher to go belly-up. So I relocated to California, to lick my wounds and write IN THE WEEDS.