I write fiction.

I started writing in college at the University of California, Santa Barbara while getting my undergraduate degree at the College of Creative Studies (CCS) with an “emphasis” on computer science. CCS is a small intellectual enclave within the greater UCSB campus that gives undergraduate students freedom to explore work outside of their emphasis and build a personalized study plan. For someone like myself on the computer science path, the flexibility of CCS allowed me to branch outside the College of Engineering on campus and explore other coursework.

One of my favorite classes was a CCS class for creative writing. All classes given at CCS were “variable unit” which is even better than “pass/fail”. For any course that CCS offered, you could take it and if you “failed”, you would simply get 0 units and the class would be removed from your transcript. So the teachers had no power to simply fail students who didn’t want to do the coursework. They had to adapt and work really hard to get the students to do work they love and engage in. The creative writing class was particularly good, and really started to pull stories out of my memory that I could get down on paper.

Soon I started to love writing, and started getting pieces in the UCSB Daily Nexus published and I even did a brief stint as a staff writer. I became enamored with the idea that I needed to save my thoughts and get them down on paper, lest they be lost forever.

Fast forward to 2010. I’d found my way to Los Angeles, working my way up the management ladder for the budding technology industry in “Silicon Beach”. My future wife introduced me to Donald Freed, a playwright and author who had retired from teaching at UCLA and USC. His weekly writing salon was his latest forum where he worked with authors to elicit their stories–his debt of honor. I dusted off some of my stories from college, submitted them and then started to write once again.

As of 2020 I have now been published in Playboy, the American Writers Review, and the Red Savina Review. I have a complete unpublished novel, titled Michael Turner, which is the tale of a young man selling vacuum cleaners on credit through the backwoods of Montana. My current project is the Sugar Siphon, which details a teenagers struggle with Type 1 Diabetes.