|
 I grew up in La Mirada, California, a place the city-limits signs trumpeted as the "Courtesy Capital of the World." L.M. was about as exciting as that cheesy boast implies, and for me, shooting hoops, playing little league ball, annoying authority figures and banking a skateboard off any paved slopes available was about as good as it got. But like scads of other landlocked So Cal kids I managed to escape to Huntington Beach a lot in the summer, and occasionally I scored an overnight stay at my grandma's house in Seal Beach. By the time high school rolled around team sports were out, Led Zeppelin and surfing were in, and I was chasing waves up and down the coast.
After high school I attended Cal. State Fullerton, majoring in business and communications while consistently underwhelming the field, but I fared much better in the literature and writing courses I took as electives. Eventually I got the picture and switched my major to English. When I graduated I had no game plan beyond returning the rented cap and gown, so I stumbled into a job selling office copiers, which, in the early '80s, was a lowdown, cutthroat scene. I later took a cushier sales job with Motorola, experiencing firsthand the rapture of The Expense Account and Company Car. During much of the '80s I lived in Seal Beach (which bears a striking resemblance to the town of Christianitos in Reef Dance) and vastly enjoyed the small-town beach life. I surfed constantly. Life was good. Then, in an expansive, can-do moment, I enrolled in law school full-time. Life was hell.
By 1990 I'd finished law school and passed the bar, but the desire to write was taking hold. I studied creative writing at U.C. Irvine at night and began submitting pieces to Surfer Magazine and The Surfer's Journal on spec, piling up rejection slips but occasionally seeing my work in print. The job market for lawyers was dismal, but in time I found a position in juvenile dependency court representing parents who couldn't afford counsel. I soon learned that another dependency attorney, Douglas Anne Munson, was a novelist and mystery writer who taught writing privately and at U.C.L.A. I approached Ms. Munson about joining one of her group classes, but our schedules didn't jive and nothing came of it.
In 1993 I left dependency to prosecute negligent attorneys for the State Bar of California. A year later I began work on a novel, and on the same day I finished the first chapter of what would become Reef Dance, I bumped into Ms. Munson again in line at a drugstore pharmacy. (Since L.A. County has about nine million residents, I attribute this chance meeting to divine intervention). Over the next year or so I worked with her one-on-one, chapter-by-chapter, cutting and shaping and revising as the novel progressed.
After
Reef Dance was completed, I spent three long years seeking a literary
agent, but when I got one he sold it in less time than it took him to read
it. He also made a deal for a second, unwritten book featuring J. Shepard
which later became Bluebird Rising.
These days I am a prosecutor for the State Attorney General and live in
southern California with my wife and two young sons. (I suppose you might want to know that buying my books will help feed and clothe my children, but please, don't feel any pressure to do the right thing).
I continue to write a lot late at night and on weekends, but I'm not complaining. I still find time to annoy authority figures (easy to do in the Law), bank a skateboard off whatever paved slopes I can find in my neighborhood, and surf whenever I can.
|
