Welcome, everyone, to my FreeWebs home page - I've never put one of these together before, so I'm winging it...

I've been writing all my life, but I only started getting serious about it after 9/11 - cliche though it is, I finally realized that I might have a talent at this business, and that planes might fall on me at any time.  So I started whipping stories into shape and sending them out into the world (with the help of my trusty 'Writer's Market' and a lot of self-addressed stamped envelopes).

Within a month, I'd had my first acceptance.  It was a small magazine in upstate New York called The Armchair Aesthete, and they said they'd love to print my story 'Where the Bee Sucks, There Suck I' (I love Shakespeare - I steal from him all the time), and would one free copy of the magazine be sufficient payment?

Oh, yeah.

I ordered twenty extra copies at three bucks each (and, if I'm typical of all new authors, that would be a hell of a money-making scheme, wouldn't it?  Oh, wait - that's poetry.com...) and then I got another acceptance.  And then another.  And pretty soon, my stories were appearing all over the small press, and my free copies were rolling in.

And then I got my first professional sale, to Hardboiled - it was only ten bucks, but that makes me a pro.

Since then, I've been more and more successful; I've had checks ranging from five dollars to over a hundred dollars, and I'm getting royalties every few months from the anthologies I've appeared in.  It doesn't mean I can quit my day job (flipping burgers for the hungry folk of America), but it's gratifying all the same.  Now, if the airplanes hit my restaurant while I'm working, at least I've had my tales published in thirty places all over the country (and one in Australia), so I'll have that as a gravestone in places like Kansas, New York, Ohio, Tennessee and California.  And there are more coming...

That's my literary bio - I'm also a son, a friend, a husband, a worker and the owner of two annoying cats.  But that stuff's not as interesting, is it?

Enjoy the website, amateurish though it may be.  And thanks for dropping by.