The writing bug bit me when I was six years old or so. I can thank my father for it. He kept his bookcases stuffed with worn paperbacks - Stephen King, Peter Benchley, Robert McCammon, just some of the names I got my hands on back then. But what I remember most is reading them... no, absorbing them, anytime I had a chance. In the middle of day while my father worked and my mother tended to another part of the house; in the middle of the night while my parents slept and my imagination tossed and turned. I couldn't pull myself away! A forbidden world had been opened to me, a portal through which I realized there was no return. But something else happened as well - a movie projector clicked on inside my head, and after all these years it just won't quit. It just rolls on and on, recreating any image I can daydream and conjuring any nightmare I imagine. And it all started with those books my father casually discarded back onto his shelves.

I'll tell you the one thing that has horrified me more than anything else, the one thing, to this day, I still haven't been able to write about. Vampires. These days, their stories are a dime a dozen, recycled over and over. Sure, they sell, people bang down the doors to read them, but are vampire tales truly as fresh as they should be? I don't know... anyway, friggin' bloodsuckers, when I was a kid I went to sleep with my sheets balled up inside my hands, pulled tight against my neck. That was my last line of defense against the undead. I figured I had a second or two to scream once the attacking vampire yanked my covers away. I had no garlic cloves to hang over my doorway; my mother would've torn that down in a second. "What the hell is that smell coming from your room? You know I work damn hard to keep this house clean! You take that down this instant!" Yeah, fucked there. Not like I could get my hands on a stake and mallet, either. Oh I'm sure my father had them in his garage somewhere, but I doubt now, as I doubted then, he would've handed them over so quickly. So yeah, I was really, really fucked back then. Vampires. Horrifying shit.

I have always wanted to communicate with the dead. I'm just too chicken shit to do so in my own home. So, if anyone has a spirit in their own house they'd like to share, please contact me!

I thought I was a failure for waiting so long until finally writing my first novel. And then I realized it's simply a matter of life. Allow me to explain. You have to live your life, and life will dictate when you are ready to write. I don't care if it's horror or romance or mystery or whatever the genre you prefer, when you write, you bare your soul. At least I do. It might be a particular emotion you're feeling at the time, a certain experience you went or was going through - writing is like sticking yourself inside the cage of a freak show. You are exposed, my friends. You are exposed. I make no apologies for it. I take life, more often than not, my life, and put it through the meat grinder until it's mashed and lumpy, slap it onto a plate and serve it under your nose. Call it therapy. Call it disturbing. Call it what you will. Just remember... you live in a glass house just like me...

I often do my best writing while drunk on wine. And I almost always drink as I write. Add Johnnie Walker Black to the list as well. Hey, I don't criticize what you do, now do I?

If there's anything else you'd like to know about me, don't be afraid to ask. Okay, maybe be a little afraid...