Tell us a little about your background. A short version of your life story.

I was born in Kansas City Missouri in 1952. My father was a branch manager with the Remington Rand company, and we moved to a different city on the average of once every 3 years or so. We settled for a period of time in Utica New York, where I eventually met my future wife while we both attended Mohawk Valley Community College. We married in 1975 after completing our college education, then moved to Chicago where I continued my studies. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 1981.

I decided near the end of my graduate studies not to pursue a teaching career. The job market was very tight, and quite frankly I’d had my fill of the liberal, pseudo-intellectual academic world by then. After receiving my degree, my wife Dawn and I relocated to Dallas Texas where I became a senior vice president of the Chamber of Commerce. There I received three Presidential Citations for Private Sector Initiatives for programs I created (two from President Reagan, and one from the first President Bush). I also became involved in the North American Free Trade Agreement negotiations, where I coordinated support for 400 officials from 3 countries over a 5 day period during the "Dallas Round" of negotiations.

Tell us your story of faith. How did you become a Christian? What flavor of Christian are you?

The "story of my faith" is an intensely personal journey for me that began with my childhood. My father was a devout Catholic, and my four brothers and I grew up in that faith. I went to Catholic school until the ninth grade, when I entered the public school system for the first time.

This transition from the sheltered life of a parochial school left me with mixed emotions. Instead of being taught each day the lessons of my faith, I now had to live them in a world where not everyone shared my beliefs. And, as I grew older, I had to deal with new issues for which I was not fully prepared (or old issues that now seemed to have shades of grey instead of being entirely black and white).

While it was more comforting on one level to have the answers of life provided to me, on reflection I have found it immeasurably more rewarding to apply the morals and values I was taught to real-world situations, and to learn new things for myself. I don’t always make the right decision initially, but I personally believe there is as much — if not more — value in struggling for the right answer as there is in having it handed to you. The journey never ends this way, and thus I am constantly forced to bring these issues to the forefront of my mind as I try to live the life I should.

Do you write full time? If not what is your day job?

One day I hope to write full time, but I’m not there yet.

Presently, I am vice president of marketing for Signal Sites, a national wireless communication company. Prior to that I was senior vice president of the national marketing agency for the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, and Easter Seals, and before that director of business development for Cassidy & Associates, the largest government affairs firm in Washington DC. I have also worked as a speech writer for a successful Congressional campaign.

Who do you like to read? What are the last five books you read?

I rarely read popular literature.

As a student in college, and later as a graduate student, I spent my time reading academic works. If I wanted entertainment, I’d watch a movie or read a magazine. Even today, for the most part I read only news magazines, newspapers, scientific journals, and history or technical books that relate to story ideas I’m attempting to develop. If I have free time, I’d rather write than read.

What made you want to be a writer?

I've always liked writing. I would think up stories to pass the time, but never wrote them down. I was too busy completing my education and establishing my career. Then one day in 1984 when I was sitting in the terminal at Newark Airport, waiting to return to Dallas after being away on a business trip for four days. I'd read every newspaper, news magazine and other light reading I could get my hands on, and was facing a 3 hour trip back home without anything to occupy my time.

Faced with the only remaining alternative I had — to actually buy a book of fiction and read it on the plane home — I trudged into the airport gift shop. The first thing to meet my eyes was a science fiction novel dealing with time travel, one of my favorite subjects. The only popular reading I ever really enjoyed as a child was a science fiction/adventure series about "Danny Dunn", so I bought the book and read it on the plane. By the time I landed I was convinced I was in the wrong profession. If that was all it took to be an author, I was convinced I could write better than that.

Fifteen years and 500 rejections later, I was proven right.

To begin my writing career, I went back to an idea I had in graduate school. I read an academic work by Stephen J. Gould titled "The Mismeasure of Man". It was about pseudo-scientific efforts at the turn of the 20th century to prove that blacks inferior to whites. I remembered a passage from the book, something about a diary written by a man traveling to America in the early 1800s who had never seen an African before. He was so repelled by the man's dark black skin and stereotypically white palms that he couldn't eat the food the slave brought him. He said the slave looked like an alien creature.

Gould used the passage to illustrate the innate bias of the times. [His point was that cultural predispositions can unconsciously influence supposedly "objective" scientific thought.] I thought the illustration might make a great science fiction great story if "turned on its head". Instead of a black slave, make it a strange-looking alien creature who has crash landed on Earth, and finds himself in servitude to some backwoods farmer. The challenge as a writer was to figure out why an obviously superior creature (after all, he got to our planet!) would allow himself to become a slave to some ignorant hillbilly. And, once I figured out a way logically to get to this point, to figure out what would happen next.

I called the story Orion's Child. I never published it, but it got me started in my writing career.

In many ways, it’s the guiding principle — but on a subliminal, not overt level. I don’t consider myself to be a "Christian writer" per se, in that I don’t set out to write religiously-inspired books. What I’ve found is that in bringing a story alive, I have choices I can make (both for the story line, and for the characters’ actions). These choices are heavily influenced by my faith and moral upbringing.

To illustrate what I mean, in my books I try to limit gratuitous sex or sex for sex’s-sake, and minimize profanity (although some profanity is used when the situation or character warrants). But most important of all, each story I tell has an underlying moral value or theme. I used the term "subliminal" above because I don’t set out to write a morality play. Instead, these themes emerge in the story through the words and actions of the characters. Since I create and control the characters, ultimately I must decide where the limits of their actions will be. I’ve found that innately I shy away from the excesses found in popular literature today, which puts me in a category of writers whose work has a Christian appeal.

The interesting thing is that rather than limiting me, this approach has led to great things. I’ve just learned that Berean will be carrying my books in their stores. By taking the approach I did, I’ve been able to appeal not only to the Christian market (one of my first reviews was in the Christian Library Journal), but I’ve also received recognition and praise from conservatives (The Conservative Monitor), traditional science fiction (Scifi-stories.com, where I was one of their top books for 2001), mainstream fiction (Cured Up With A Good Book review), and even genre fiction (Apocalypse Fiction Magazine).

The second book in my Timeshift Trilogy has just been released. Book III in this series (which I co-wrote with John William Galt, an Emmy Award winning voice talent and screen writer), will be released in 2003.

The Timeshift Trilogy is about man’s attempt to find purpose and meaning in life through science and technology, only to learn that God, ultimately, controls his destiny. He learns this gradually — both through his failed attempts to substitute technology for religion, and through a realization that religion and its institutions (such as marriage) play an important role in the healthy development of human society. These truths are revealed to the reader through the progress of the story, rather than stated outright. Thus, the book becomes a journey of discovery for the reader him/herself, as well as for inhabitants of the 25^th century in which the story takes place.

Book I, Timeshift, sets the stage for the trilogy. The year is 2416, and mankind is slowly coming to terms with the terrifying reality that as a race, it is moving toward extinction. Society is amoral, with religion little more than a discarded relic of the past. People generally contract for companionship rather than marry; Sunday is a "day off" rather than a day of worship; and although people believe in God, they put their faith in themselves rather than Him to confront the serious problems they face.

Throughout this trilogy one man, Paul Thorndyke, both mirrors society and ultimately moves beyond it to rediscover the importance of God and morality. As Timeshift begins he is completely caught up in everyday life, rejecting marriage and religion as quaint notions of the past. By the end of the first book he is lecturing the President of the United States about relying on God to help their society face the enormous challenges it confronts, and he, personally, has rejected the amoral lifestyle he led by asking the woman he loves to marry him instead of simply live with him.

The implications of this evolution in Thorndyke’s perspective begin to take shape in Timeshift Trilogy Book II: Between Two Worlds. Here, Thorndyke expressly rejects the notion of "playing God" with the lives of others by changing the past (note: in this trilogy man is able to travel back through time). And, he begins to overtly preach his philosophy, rather than simply live it quietly.

By Tmeshift Trilogy Book III: What Price Paradise? (release date 2003), this battle between science/technology and God has risen to a crescendo. Thorndyke acts to shut down the time travel process because of his religious beliefs—but is thwarted by a man who succeeds in sending one of his disciples (Keith Maravich) to 1999 to change the course of history. Thorndyke sends another man (Carson Gilmore) after him to stop his actions. The irony is that Keith believes he is acting as a "Christian", because he doesn’t know what true Christianity is, while Carson Gilmore acts out of a sense of self preservation, only to discover true morality and virtue in the process.

While the Timeshift Trilogy is not written as an overtly religious novel, what sets it apart from other contemporary science fiction works is its willingness to make God a central focus of the story. The people in the trilogy will therefore do and say things that, at times, reflect the amorality of the society in which they live. As God enters their lives they change;  sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly; sometimes recognizing the change for what it is, sometimes not. But in the end one thing remains true. Without the importance of God and Christianity, the Timeshift Trilogy would be just another cartoon-like treatment of a well-worn science fiction subject. Instead, it is a mature, sophisticated, story that lets the reader discover these truths along with the characters.

My publisher is AmErica House, a division of www.publishamerica.com . They specifically look for books that have a high moral value, with stories that show people overcoming problems that threaten to defeat them in their personal lives. I was fortunate enought to have them take a chance on me, and publish my first two books. I've actually recommended a couple of other people to them who have also been published, including Mary McKinney who wrote Shadow of Fear, a story about "two children and their determination to seek truth in a world of deceit and treachery that forces each to discover the reality of God."

Regarding the execution of the work, since I have a Ph.D. in political science and worked at one time for the largest governmental affairs firm in Washington D.C., I have a pretty good intuitive understanding of politics and society. Where hard science is involved (the laws of physics, medicine and the like), I’ve assembled a group of experts ranging from a forensic pathologist to someone at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to bounce off my ideas. Of course, the trick is to take what’s real and tweak it just enough to get a plausible new spin on it, so things like time travel become "possible". I write so the science and politics are in the background of the story though, and keep the technobabble to a minimum. The characters are the real driving force of each story.

Three things:

(1) That I can actually do it.

(2) That people will actually buy what I write. And,

(3) That my books actually get some pretty good reviews!

What is your writing process? How often and how long do you write? Do you have any rituals that you go through when writing?

Again, I’m somewhat unusual here. I can write for 10 minutes, then walk away for 2 hours and pick up where I left off immediately without missing a beat. I write on airplanes, in hotel rooms, in the car waiting to pick my daughter up from school, and with the TV on or off in the background, etc.. I think this is an outgrowth of my days as a Ph.D. candidate, where I pretty much followed the same ritual in writing my dissertation.

What words of wisdom do you have to people who want to write?

My advice to all fledgling authors is threefold:

1. Don’t give up

2. Keep re-writing your work every 6 months to a year to make it better

3 When you do get published, work hard to sell your book.

A little stupidity doesn’t hurt either. Using my own case as an example, I was too stupid to know that after 15 years of rejections, I should have called it quits. And, after I was published by a small press, I should have reconciled myself to selling no more than 50 books to my closest friends and relatives. Because I was too dumb to realize these "truths", I ended up getting published in the first place, and having a fair amount of success at that.

I’d also suggest that you write for yourself, and not for others. I probably could have gotten published sooner if I wrote books that had a lot of sex in them, but I deliberately chose to go a different route. You will find some profanity in my books, and occasionally men and women will interact in a sexual way, but these scenes are done with restraint, and are meant to illustrate a theme or further the story, not substitute for the story itself.

Finally, while it’s nice to have a good review of your book, don’t place too much faith in what others think if you truly believe your work has merit. One reviewer in England used my novel to rant against the tobacco industry, the death penalty, American virtues, and George Bush. I’m still trying to figure out the connection with the story I wrote ... other than the fact that he was a socialist who hated my conservative politics, my country, and the way my characters behaved when presented with a real moral crisis. But in the end I remained true to my own beliefs, and the rewards have come both in good reviews from other sources, and most importantly through my own personal satisfaction.