Under Jurisdiction

I was born into a military family.  My mom moved my entire family (six kids in all — my three brothers & two sisters) all over the world as my daddy’s assignments took us from coast to coast in the United States, to Germany, and to India; I spent half of the first fourteen years of my life with no access to radio or television in the English language.  As a result my brothers and sisters and I, thrown on our own resources, read ravenously and passed books around from sib to sib as they came in; which also meant that the books in the house ranged from Little Golden Books (remember those?  No?  Dang, I’m old) to my oldest brother’s high school and college reading.  One of our family traditions is opening a gift on Christmas morning to discover a book with the bookmark in place from where your brother or sister had to stop reading in order to wrap the present, with a little note to “please loan it back to me when you’ve read it.”

My first exposure to science fiction came with my brother Robbie’s (er, Bob’s) subscription to science fiction book clubs, which brought “I, Robot,” “The Voyage of the Space Beagle,” and “The World of Null-A” into the house years before I read “Stranger in a Strange Land” or even “Fahrenheit 451.”  We were overseas when the paperback re-issue of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” hit in the mid-sixties, so the books were passed around in my 6th grade/7th grade class as people finished them.  (See?  Now you know how dang old I really am.)

In a resource-constrained environment the obvious response to a desire to read a particular story was to write it yourself, because there was no other way to get to read it.  That’s where I started, and where I still am, writing the stories that I want to read so that I’ll get to read them when I’m done.  (This might give rise to speculation given the subject matter of the Jurisdiction series, but my mother said that “a writer can write about anything she pleases, because a writer’s world is the world of the mind.”  If that helps any.)  The fact that other people enjoy reading them too remains a slightly confusing wonderment, but I’m very grateful that people do.

I’m ably represented by Jenn Jackson at the Donald Maass Literary Agency in New York, New York.  You can contact Jenn at jjackson@maassagency.com if you’d like to throw some money at me for subsidiary rights (grin).

My wife Maggie and I were recently legally married in the state of Washington after thirty-three years of living in sin.  I have two dogs, three brothers, two sisters, manyseveral nieces and nephews; a “general” ham radio license; and live in Seattle.