The Pursuit of Cool (ePub)

My "upmarket literary" fiction takes a love of language and uses it to create original characters, then runs the characters through riveting plots. My short fiction has appeared in Gawker, io9, New Orleans Review, New Millennium Writings, South Carolina Review, Oasis, and Twelve Stories. My novella is The Surfer, and my novel, The Pursuit of Cool, is a Winner of Next Generation Indie Award and a critically acclaimed novel with strong reviews from Kirkus, Midwest Book Review, Writer's Digest, and many others.

Growing up in Charleston, S.C., I read more J.R.R. Tolkien and listened to more Van Halen than was probably healthy. But then I read Kurt Vonnegut and Joan Didion and listened to Echo & the Bunnymen and things got balanced out. Next came Tom Wolfe and Radiohead. After college at Emory, I traveled to Europe and in Scotland I stood in the rain among Bronze Age standing stones and realized I wanted to be a writer. I scribbled in lots of journals and attended many workshops. In the 90s I spent a year traveling and camping around America in a Chevy Cavalier with my wife (then girlfriend). In King's Canyon National Park a bear tried to rip a door off our car because it smelled food in the back seat. We scared it away, but not before the bear turned and stared blankly, and seemed to consider killing us.

I live in Southern California, near LA. I love travel and have been to many far flung parts of the globe. Besides writing fiction, I am a screenwriter, music lover, movie fanatic, artist, surfer and snorkel enthusiast. You might find me drinking kombucha tea or staring at the sky with wonder and appreciation.