Raised by a single father in a suburb of Dallas, Texas, I attended college at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, through scholarships and financial aid.  While there, I studied creative writing and professional writing, making the Dean's List numerous times while working as an intern at The Journal of Solution Chemistry, an international academic journal.  I also worked as an Associate Editor for the college newspaper, The Tartan, and spent one summer as an intern in the Adult Education division of Goodwill Industries of Pittsburgh.

 

After graduation, I took a Greyhound bus south to Miami, Florida, to study creative writing at the University of Miami, where I was a James Michener fellow, the managing editor of the literary journal, Mangrove, and an instructor of both Composition and Creative Writing.

 

After the completion of my thesis and two years of intensive study, I returned to Dallas where I worked as a proofreader and then a medical editor for Physicians' Education Resource, a company which provides Continuing Medical Education information to oncologists. At the same time, I taught two courses of English Composition at Mountain View Community College.

 

In the summer of 2000, armed with nothing more than an archaic laptop and an invitation to crash on a friend's couch, I drove across country to Northern California hoping to mine the rumored dot.com boom.  Although I did not strike stock options, I did gain valuable experience as a copy editor, freelance writer, and instructional designer for a variety of clients, including E*Offering, Wit SoundView, USENIX, vrace.com, LegalRecruiter.com, DigitalThink, and VitesseLearning.  

 

After resuming an acquaintance with a college friend, Michelle Hall, I courted her in a cross-country romance that—eventually—led to her residence in Oakland, California and our marriage in October of 2004.  When Michelle, formerly a VP at OREXCO, was offered a promotion in 2005, we relocated to Cincinnati in an effort to escape the astronomical housing costs of the San Francisco Bay Area.