Thanks for visiting my site. I created this website to tell you about my writing and a little about myself, and to give you an avenue to contact me if you’d like to.
My books are available in print and digital formats through the Fictions tab above. Many are available as audiobooks too.
Affiliations and Background
I do my best to follow Jesus Christ foremost, and if you get to know my characters you’ll find that although precious few are Christians, each of them has spiritual views that affect the way they look at the world. Granted, many haven’t thought through what they believe very carefully, and of those who have, many don’t choose to follow what they believe very strictly. And some just make up what they believe as they go along.
I spent my childhood in southern California, one of three boys. Whether this is typical or not I can’t say, but growing up as the middle son there was some discussion about the fact that I caused more fights than the other two. Here’s the kind of kid you would have seen if you’d spotted me when you were going through Long Beach or Huntington Beach a bunch of years ago. Looks like I was plotting something.
I went to college at the University of Southern California, where I took a fiction writing workshop with a young author who founded the school’s undergraduate program in creative writing that year. His name is TC Boyle, and his first book of short stories was published soon after I met him. During my senior year he was kind enough to work with me as my academic advisor in an internship program. His encouragement gave me the nerve to keep writing, and I finished my first novel before graduation. Like most first novels, that one hasn’t had eyes laid on it in a long time, and probably never will again.
With college graduation looming and publishers somehow failing to beat a path to my door, I found a job with a bank in Beverly Hills as a technical writer. I was later accepted into their management training program and I emerged a few years later with an assignment that paired me with some very knowledgeable businessmen, and a few that were still wet behind the ears like me. My experiences there contributed to the setting of my novel Cash Burn, but nearly everything else in Cash Burn is fictional. I worked in Beverly Hills for ten years, and then my wife and I emigrated south, all the way to San Diego. I did some time with a few other banks until 2005, when I joined former colleagues to start Square 1 Bank. After going public in 2014 with offices nationwide, our bank was purchased in 2015. I endured a few years following that acquisition, and left late in 2018 and joined a strong organization in the Bay Area called Avidbank, where I now work. My LinkedIn Profile has the details.
I’ve been asked by several people how I find time to produce novels while employed in a banking career that’s often been pretty demanding. The answer is that I go to sleep a little earlier and get up a little earlier than I would otherwise, getting my writing and editing done before my day job begins. By devoting those quiet, morning hours to writing I’m usually able to get three to five hundred words written or polished before the pressure of the day begins at work. At the pace I write and edit, I can usually produce a completed manuscript in a year, and get it polished up and edited by a pro within six or eight more months. Since Cash Burn, I’ve released a novel every year or two.
Following the release of my sixth novel, Once Removed, I shifted gears to complete a series for children that I’d started when my son was about the age of the kid in the picture above. Those four books are available here, published under the pen name Curtis Walker.
I returned to writing for grown-ups after the Curtis Walker excursion, and in 2020 I published The Cowboy, a coming-of-age novel intended for adults but suitable for kids; I recommend parental supervision if kids under twelve years old read it, due to some adult themes.
God willing, I’ll complete my next novel, Saving April, sometime in 2021.
You can learn more about some of my interests in the “Facts” portion of this website.
