That’s me, in the picture over there. I was born and grew up in Fargo, North Dakota, graduated with a bachelor of journalism from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, worked on the copy desk at a newspaper in western Nevada County, California, for a couple years, and then moved to New York City. I met a girl from Iowa out there, and eventually we got married and decided to move back closer to our families. We bought a house in Madison in 2009, and now we live here with a cat named Priscilla Pufferson and our son, born in spring 2011, Griffin.
I work in an office in our basement. I do a combination of freelance journalism, commercial copywriting, copy editing of books and magazines, corporate communications, website design, and social media management. My regular clients include Instore and Indesign, trade magazines for jewelry store owners; Madison’s alt weekly newspaper Isthmus; and science and science-fiction blog io9, for whom I write about Hugo Award–winning novels. When we lived in New York, I was the copy editor at Spin magazine.
Before I started writing full time, I spent many years in the restaurant industry, as a host, server, bartender, and manager. For a while, I waited tables at Serendipity 3 in New York, which you might be familiar with if you’re an Oprah or Rachael Ray fan, or if you’ve seen the John Cusack/Kate Beckinsale movie of the same name. (Or, you know, if you’re from New York.)