About

This website represents something that has been building for quite some time. I studied journalism at the University of New Hampshire from 1993-1997 and mechanical engineering at Oregon State University from 2003-2006. I earned bachelor’s degrees at both institutions and have worked professionally in both fields. This site lies somewhere in the borderlands between the two providing an outlet for essays, fiction, technical nonfiction and odd mathy things. I am also making my talents available in the way of freelance writing for anyone in the market for skillfully crafted words.

The path that brought this site into being is long and indirect. Writing was my first love. I remember a story writing contest back in second grade that consumed my entire world for a week’s time. It was about a villager that unknowingly brings a minotaur egg home which subsequently hatches, grows and kills a bunch of people. The brave villagers eventually form a righteous mob and take the thing out in the end. Much of the detail of that first story is long faded from memory, but I can still very clearly see the first illustration that accompanied the story of the villager carrying the egg home. I also remember that a few days after submitting the story, it dawned on me that a minotaur was a mammal and therefore probably didn’t hatch from an egg. The eight year old version of myself found it easy to convince himself that this oversight was the reason why he did not win the contest, and that the murdering was all acceptably in context. I digress. Writing and storytelling were what I loved most from an early age. Math and science courses always came very easily for me, but English was my favorite subject. It was to the disappointment of both teachers and parents when I opted to take an auto mechanics course over calculus my senior year. I should point out that I went through a phase where I thought I was a gearhead. It turns out that I was not, I’m just good with tools. So, auto mechanics seemed cooler to me than calculus, and I mistakenly thought higher math would have no value to a writer.

I enrolled in the journalism program at UNH because I saw it as a more versatile degree than one in general English studies. After graduation, I wrote for several small newspapers. I even did some editing. It was work I enjoyed and was good at, but it wasn’t exactly what I wanted. I tried my hand at fiction writing, but everything I wrote seemed kind of flat to me. After a couple years of that, I got it in my head that I needed some life experiences to bolster my voice and give me a subject of substance to write about. So, I picked up and moved to Portland, Oregon.

The turn of the millennium was a magical time to be in Portland. Unfortunately, the steady writing work I was used to was hard to find. I took on service industry work to help keep rent paid and food in my belly. Jobs in bars and kitchens were easy to come by and always carried wonderful social benefits. As I took more and more service work, it eventually came to pass that I was no longer even looking for writing work. Furthermore, I was still having trouble finding any inspiration at all for creative writing and that was a frustration that just smoldered in me.

It dawned on me that I was deep in a rut and needed to change things up again. At first, I considered going back to grad school for literature but I couldn’t shake the fear that it would be a move along the same rut as opposed to a move out of it. I figured if I could get a second degree in something technical, I could make myself eligible for work that was more in demand. Like I said, I have a natural aptitude in math and science. That was how I ended up at Oregon State University studying mechanical engineering.

I graduated with my BS in 2006. I currently work as a design engineer in the technical ceramics industry. Prior to that I did a tour in the semiconductor and consumer electronics industries performing thermal analysis and process engineering. Before that, that I spent as short time at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard working as a fluid systems engineer. And then there was an internship with Dept. of Energy as a grunt with a calculator for a research team focused on aluminum furnace efficiency. Not surprisingly, my background in writing was an asset every step of the way. Throughout the entirety of my engineering career I have always been able to stand out as a superior technical communicator. Whether the audience was sales team, management, operators, customers or other engineers, I have enjoyed tremendous success at relaying technical information in a clear and thorough manner.

Not altogether surprisingly I suppose, but my passion for creative writing was rekindled somewhere along the line. I had a notion for a novel that I worked on in my spare time. My engineering work also began to sow seeds for nonfiction projects, too. I found that the more I wrote, the more I wanted to write and the more I had to say. In stark contrast to where I was 15 years ago, I now have more ideas than I have time.

Now this website stands at the nexus of the two things I love; writing and engineering. It serves as a platform for me to showcase my work as well as a method to make writing services available to others. I am very eager to watch it grow and change in time. I’m still in the early stages of editing and adding content, but there are big plans for the fall and winter of 2020 so check in often. Hopefully, site visitors will enjoy the content nearly as much as I’m enjoying creating it.