I grew up in a far suburb of Los Angeles, the oldest in a family of four children, the offspring of a research biologist and an artist in stained glass, which eccentric family experience formed the basis for my first book a memoir "Our Grandpa Was An Alien" (Booklocker, 2004) after I had written many, many short accounts of growing up in mid-century suburbia.

After earning a professionally useless degree in English Literature (California State University Northridge, 1976) an un-slaked taste for adventure, foreign travel (and a regular paycheck) led me to enlist in the United States Air Force, where I trained as a radio and television broadcast specialist, and served for twenty years in places as various as Greece, Spain, Japan, Korea, Greenland and Ogden, Utah, in a wide assortment of duties and pleasures which included midnight alt-rock DJ, TV news anchor, video-production librarian, radio and television writer and producer, production manager, tour guide and driving a bright orange Volvo sedan from Athens to Zaragoza, Spain, accompanied only by a small and cranky child.

I retired from the Air Force in 1997, and began working for various small firms in San Antonio as an office manager, administrative assistant and executive secretary. By 2002, I had become exceedingly bored with all that, and leapt at an invitation to became a regular contributor to a military-oriented weblog, "Sgt. Stryker's Daily Brief" (now "The Daily Brief"). The build-up to Desert Storm had begun, and my daughter was serving as an active-duty Marine. Writing for the blog was an outlet for me and I wrote anything and everything; essays and commentary on matters historical, personal, political, cultural, literary and military.

One thing led to another, and with the encouragement of various blog-fans, I got hooked on writing historical fiction. I brought out "To Truckee's Trail" in 2006; that's the story of the first ever wagon-train party to bring wagons over the Sierra Nevada, which marked the opening of the California Trail. The Adelsverein Trilogy followed, which was originally going to be just a single book, but the experiences of the German settlers in Texas became so interesting to me, and there was so much non-fiction about them that it ran to three books, and I wasn't even finished at that. As it turned out, there are another three books, relating to some of the secondary characters in the Trilogy; Daughter of Texas and Deep in the Heart - about early Texas, the war for independence, the Alamo and the eventful decade of the Republic of Texas. My latest book, the Quivera Trail is sort of a sequel to the Trilogy, dealing with the adventures of two young Englishwomen who arrive in Texas in 1876.

Besides historical novels, I review books and movies for PODBRAM and for the Amazon Vine program, and contribute to several blogs and on-line discussion groups. I currently live in San Antonio with my daughter and an assortment of dogs and cats, and travel within Texas doing lectures and talks about my follow-up novel series, the Adelsverein Trilogy.