BIOGRAPHY
Thirty years of playing music isn’t exactly the best training for an author. Thirty years of writing would be more like it. But playing music is what I did, so that’s what I had to work with.
To set the record straight, I was a piano player, also venturing off into electronic keyboards from time to time. My career, which started in Houston, took me to nearly every state in the Union, as well as to several unusual foreign countries, all the while roving through disparate musical genres: rock & roll, rhythm & blues, and country. I played in clubs, concerts, TV, radio, and recording studios. I played large venues in front of tens of thousands of people and in smoky bars for no one at all. My journey found me living in Memphis, Nashville, Fort Lauderdale, New Orleans, and finally, my beloved Key West, where I lived for sixteen years, and where I retired from music around 2003.
I had begun writing almost by accident somewhere in the late 1980s, while living and playing in New Orleans. I was encouraged to do so by a friend of mine, , who was herself a writer. She had read a little account I wrote of an overseas trip I’d taken, and she seemed to think I could make up stories and string words together in a coherent fashion, filling up hundreds of pages in the process. Of course, I disagreed, claiming fiction was for “real” writers.
She stayed on my case, though, and pretty soon, I got started. On and off for the next twenty years, I eventually completed six novels and some dozen short stories. Oh, and did I mention hundreds (or was it thousands?) of rejection slips.
I left Key West in late 2006 for Las Vegas, where I live today. Living here is much more agreeable than I thought it would be, and I’ve even found a nice home on the water! (okay, okay, it’s a manmade lake, but believe me, it’ll do) I’ve played a lot of poker since arriving here, but I’m now devoting most of my time to writing. I scored with a couple of short stories, one in the 2009 Wizards Of Words Anthology and another in the online zine A Twist Of Noir. Most recently, I placed other stories with the webzines, Mysterical e and Slow Trains.
And then it happened. L&L Dreamspell, a small traditional press in Texas, is going to release one of my novels. It’s called The Take, a compact noir tale of ordinary people, minor players in society, caught up in extraordinary circumstances and emotions: greed, lust, and the survival instinct. The publication date will be sometime in 2010. Look for it.
Meanwhile, my rock & roll novel, Cadillac’s Comin’, is available right now on Amazon’s Kindle. It tells the hard story of a rockabilly one-hit wonder who recorded for Sun Records in the 1950s. I’ve got high hopes for this book, because I don’t think there’s ever been anything like it. You can get it for only $2.99, and if you don’t have a Kindle, you can download a Kindle app for free onto your computer.
