At 14, after watching an episode of the original Star Trek involving Klingon battle-cruisers, he invented differential calculus over the next three weeks—including a complete new symbolism, since he had formally studied neither algebra nor geometry and had to discover the axioms necessary to derive the proper results. He was crushed when he took his new discovery to his general science teacher and found that Newton and Leibniz had already done this three centuries before.
In 1970, he entered the University of Illinois College of Engineering under a program in which poor children with high ACT scores had their tuition and fees paid by the State of Illinois. While he was there, he became a techno-hippie, which he remains to this day. After college, he worked in a manufacturing plant to support his wife and new daughter, working his way up from the assembly line to the head of Quality Assurance for the factory in 8 1/2 years.
After the plant closed during the '82 recession, he became a contractor for the Department of Energy and working at the U of I and Fermilab, he ran the construction teams which built the majority of the muon detector coverage for the Collider Detector at Fermilab, which was activated in 1986 and discovered the Top Quark in 1995.
After a brief stint at the Supercollider in the Dallas area, he returned to the Champaign area and was the laboratory supervisor for the General Chemistry accelerated freshman classes until January, 2008, when he retired to become a full time author.
Hobbies include RPG tabletop and computer gaming, reading, philosophy, and being a curmudgeon. He lives with his three wives and husband in a wonderful house in Champaign. They have seven cats and a dog. He plans to dedicate the rest of his life to writing, gaming, and love.
Riding the Hell-Bound Train is his first book.
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