I was born in California in 1957, but my parents moved back to Oklahoma when I was only eight months old.  I grew up in Oklahoma, moving from town to town because my dad liked to move.  I didn't make a lot of lasting friends when I was a kid because I was always prepared to keep moving.  Everywhere I lived, I built a tree house, collected comics and books, and explored everywhere I could go on foot.  I managed to scare my mom to death and get a spanking nearly every day.  But I slipped away the next day as soon as I could.

My first love was listening to my mom read to me.  ROBINSON CRUSOE, PINOCCHIO, PETER PAN, all the classics.  And comic books.  Back then you could get two for a quarter (except if you bought a GIANT sized 80-pager or a T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents) and have a penny left over for gum.  She read those to me, then I'd read them to myself and try my hand at artwork.  That was when I was six.

By the time I was in third grade, I was writing all the time.  It was something I could do by myself no matter what else was going on.  My me-time, which was hard to come by when you had four younger brothers you were supposed to be partially responsible for.

When I was in fifth grade, I knew I wanted to be a writer.  Unfortunately, I lived in Oklahoma and figured you had to live in New York or California to pull that off.  But I kept writing.  Nobody read it, but I liked doing it.  Just putting the words together, watching the people inside my head, borrowing those emotions and those worlds.

In sixth grade, I got my first library card.  I could only check out 5 books at a time.  My mom would only take me every two weeks.  I got the books on Monday, had them read by Wednesday, and started writing sequels to them on Thursday.  I read everything Andre Norton and Robert Heinlein wrote during the 1960s.  I started working oddjobs to get money to buy books at TG&Y department stores in Oklahoma City, and discovered Tarzan of the Apes.  I added vines to the tree houses, and collected bruises and scrapes constantly.

In 8th grade, I discovered DOC SAVAGE and THE SHADOW and the pulp magazines, and was pretty much ruined for life.  I had to be a writer, but I just didn't know how.

I finished high school at Byng, then went to college and got a B.A. in English, wrote a few novels and short stories that still haven't seen the light of day, got married somewhere in there and tried to forget about writing.  But I kept coming back to it.  Writing a novel saved my life when I went through my first divorce.

On January 8 (Elvis' birthday), I sold my first novel to the Executioner series.  Feroze Mohammed, who has gone on to become one of my dearest friends, purchased that book and several dozen after it.  He taught me a lot of what he knew about writing, and now we share ideas about writing and books.

Now, I've written over 140 novels, have gotten an Alex Award, a Runner-Up in the Christy Award, been inducted into the Oklahoma Professional Writers' Hall of Fame, and am still going strong.

I'm a father with five children, four boys and a girl.  I coach little league baseball and basketball, garden, travel, READ ALL THE TIME, love TV and movies, and love learning about anything that catches my mind.  Since I'm ADHD, there are a lot of things that capture my attention.  I'm a constant student and always amazed at what is being discovered on a daily basis.

I also teach writing classes at the University of Oklahoma in Norman and at the Moore-Norman Technology Center in Norman, OK, specializing in writing classes as well as forensic classes.

ENTRY 12-17-07

I turned 50 Sunday. It was tough. I'd been dreading it for months, and with other things that were out of control in my life, I really struggled through it. Today, it's not so bad. I know I won't have to do that again!

When I was at my mom's on Thanksgiving, I raided her photo stash. There weren't as many as I remembered. I've got four brothers and they beat me to a lot of stuff. But I made copies and I'm taking the originals back to Mom on Christmas.

But going through these pictures made me realize how far I've come. What you're looking at here is an eight-year-old boy who spent his summers on a horse, crawdad fishing, chasing snakes, and investigating every interesting hole that was open in the five acres of oil company land next to where Daddy had his service station in Oklahoma City.

The service station was a Fina unit on NE 23rd and Bartell Road. We lived there from 1965 to 1969, and moved to Seminole right before the lunar landing. Things have changed over there as well.

Daddy had been gone from the family for a few months and we hadn't gotten to see him. When we arrived, he had a trailer house out in back of the station for us to live in, and a couple of Shetland ponies that weren't quite broke. I ended up breaking them. I broke horses from the age of seven till I was a freshman in college. (Now I worry when my kids play organized sports! I didn't think anything about getting hurt when I was that age, and I guess most adults didn't either. Also, the horse in this picture is a Shetland, not one of the full-sized horses -- paints, appaloosas, and quarterhorse mix -- that we broke for other people.)

People talk about guys being cowboys these days because they like to ride horses, be around livestock, and drive old pickup trucks. I wasn't. Daddy had horses because he wanted them, and we rode them for something to do -- he often made us quit riding them long before we'd had enough, but we found out you could ride a horse into the ground. We ate the livestock. And all there was to drive was old pickup trucks.

I never saw myself as a cowboy. I was just a kid who liked to ride horses and was willing to crawl up on anything anybody could put a bridle on. I've got the injuries to prove it, though we didn't discover most of them till I was older. I got thrown off, bit, stomped, kicked, and generally abused by everything I managed to throw a leg over. I thought it was great fun. Then again, I didn't get killed so that was a plus. Growing up like that probably made me the adrenaline junkie I am now.

I look back on those days and can't believe that was me. But it was. I've got the memories to prove it. The horse's name was Cocoa and the birddog's name was Noble. He was the first birddog I'd ever seen at that time, and he was a constant companion for me all over that eighty acres.

That saddle I'm sitting on was mostly new and cost a whopping $50, which Daddy had to pay out. For a year I rode horses without one. You don't break horses with saddles on them because you don't want the saddles torn up. Riders, Daddy always thought, were expendable. I figured I was always smart enough and skilled enough to stay on top of a horse that was trying to throw me off, knock me off under a tree limb, or shed me through strands of barbed wire. Mostly I was right -- eventually. I never found an unbroken horse I could sit the first time, and some times not even the first day. It took a lot of bruises to break a horse with spirit.

Of course, back then we didn't have video games and our only action figures were stick people with capes. Horses didn't stand a chance against a bored kid in need of an action fix. Horses got tired. Back then, I was ready to go all day.