The first story I ever wrote was called The Boy and The Bee, and it was a couple pages with giant handwritten text stapled together. I write a poem about a ghost that was apparently as dreadful as the subject, because when I asked Ms. Rodda how to get it published, she just said "no." At almost 1,000 rejections and counting, this is where I can easily point to the origin of my thick skin in that sense.
​

At fifteen, Bedfellows was published in a Halloween anthology. At eighteen, Critic was published by Horror Tree's Trembling With Fear, which was my first paid credit. That five bucks Critic paid went a long way during the shit situation I was in at the time. 

When I was eighteen I met the love of my life, Angie, and I do not think she would have fallen for me were it not for my first novel, Numb. She has since become my editor, and without her I'd have a lot fewer stories published and I probably wouldn't have decided to keep pushing myself to improve my craft and searching for my limits. Every time I do think I've found my limit, I manage to climb the next peak with her help. She herself is an amazing writer who has stories published such as the Sound in WhyNot Magazine.

My writing matured with me, not to say my early publications are necessarily juvenile, but I've become enamored with the human condition, what it means to be human, what it means to be, existing inside institutions and our responsibilities and liabilities, and a million other topics and niches. Addiction and obsession, particularly the former since I have personally seen it destroy so many lives, is a theme liable to appear frequently across my work because it's such a deeply painful, human experience. And I think it's important to see the human inside the addiction.

Much of what I write pulls from certain aspects of my childhood. The isolation and neglect I felt. Wishing I could help family members who I in all reality had no ability to. I've seen the best and worst of humanity, sometimes from the same person. Life is gray. It's strange, it's beautiful, it's what you make of it.