Born in 1965, the author grew up on a working cattle ranch in the desert thirty miles from Wickenburg, Arizona, which at that time was exactly the middle of nowhere. Work, cactus and heat were plentiful, forms of recreation were not. The TV got two channels when it wanted to, and only in the evening after someone hand cranked the balky diesel generator to life. All of which meant that his primary form of escape was reading.

At 18 he escaped to Tucson where he attended the University of Arizona. A number of fruitless attempts at productive majors followed, none of which stuck. Discovering he liked writing, the author tried journalism two separate times, but had to drop it when he realized that he had no intention of conducting interviews with actual people but preferred simply making them up.

After graduating with a degree in Creative Writing in 1989, he backpacked Europe with a friend and caught the travel bug. With no meaningful job prospects, he hitchhiked around the U.S. for a while then went back to school to learn to be a high school English teacher. He got a teaching job right out of school in the middle of the year. The job lasted exactly one semester, or until he received his summer pay and realized he actually had money to continue backpacking.

The next stop was Australia, where he hoped to spend six months, working wherever he could, then a few months in New Zealand and the South Pacific Islands. However, his plans changed irrevocably when he met a lovely Swiss woman, Claudia, in Alice Springs. Undoubtedly swept away by his lack of a job or real future, she agreed to allow him to follow her back to Switzerland where, a few months later, she gave up her job to continue traveling with him. Over the next couple years they backpacked the U.S., Eastern Europe and Australia/New Zealand, before marrying and settling in the mountains of Colorado, in a small town called Salida.

In Colorado they starved and froze, started their own electronics business, and had a couple of sons, Dylan and Daniel. In 2005 they shut the business down and moved back to Tucson. The author is currently writing madly and trying to avoid all forms of actual work.