I'm the middle child of five. My early years on Staten Island were spent like a Catholic-educated feral cat. Out of the house after breakfast, home for dinner. No questions. Regular smoker at eleven (quit at thirty-two). Actually liked school, especially high school, where my modern language was Russian. Eczema kept me out of Vietnam. I did inhale. Father at twenty and grandfather at forty-seven. College took nine years at four schools (BS from Fairleigh Dickinson, 1973). I've earned money cutting grass in a graveyard (genesis for prize winning story, The Sin in the Cemetery), washing dishes, sorting mail, collecting for a finance company, peddling encyclopedias (five days of humility boot camp), bookkeeping, supervising seventy typists and file clerks, and selling insurance - eventually owning the agency with my older brother. After cashing out in 2004, I switched from part-time to full-time fiction writing. Pieces have won (2007) and placed (2008) in the Florida First Coast Writers’ short fiction contests. Others have appeared in numerous e-zines until I switched to writing novels in 2010. Replacement Children is my first published novel. Evenings and Mournings, the second. A sequel to Replacement Children will be published in early 2018 My first-and-only wife, Ann Marie, enriches my life in Ponte Vedra Beach, FL, while the rest of our vast clan prefers to freeze half the year in the northeast. Go figure.