Glad You Asked
It's only recently that I've begun to more fully embrace the stereotype of the copywriter with a manuscript in his top drawer. Instead of the Great American Novel, mine is a pile of short stories constantly in search of a printed home. I've written fiction as long ago as the sixth grade. (It was a play loosely based on the big Dallas cliffhanger, Who Shot JR? Turns out none of the other 6th graders wanted to skip recess to rehearse. Go figure.) It wasn't until about three or four years ago that I started to focus on it again. I joined the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver for roughly a year. My wife and I then moved to Shanghai, where she taught English and I concentrated on writing full-time. When we returned to the States, I started sending things out in earnest.
So far I've been fortunate enough to find homes for a handful of stories in Opium , Hobart , Barrelhouse , Cimarron Review, , Asimov‘s Science Fiction and Wild Blue Yonder (the in-flight magazine for Frontier Airlines), as well as a few pieces online in McSweeney's Internet Tendency , Yankee Pot Roast , Opium and Barrelhouse again, and The Science Creative Quarterly . I've had the pleasure of co-authoring a few of those online pieces with John Leary, a painfully funny man with a good haircut who still lives and writes in Shanghai.
At this point, my life revolves more around my toddler, wife and work than the written word, but the stories are still in the drawer, still occasionally pushing to get out.