Okay, so somehow you have stumbled onto this site and noticed a link for my bio, so you clicked it. Good.

I could spend paragraphs explaining my life story in excruciating detail and list all kinds of important accolades and achievements that I have acquired. The only problem is that my life isn’t much of a story and my accolades are practically nonexistent. So what does that leave us with?

Who Am I?

I am a person who has had a decades long love-hate relationship with writing. I studied it (a little bit) in school and could, at times, be considered passable. While I enjoyed reading short stories, I found it difficult to create my own. My brain told me that real writers create deep, meditative novels that leave their readers contemplating ethics, morals, social structure, or any other of a number of heavy subjects. If I was going to put in all of that effort, I wanted to make something that could change the world.

As it turns out, I can safely say I’m not much good at creating that either. And I tried. I tried quite a few times. Like many (or probably all) writers, I have notebooks and digital files full of lofty ideas that will, hopefully, never see the light of day. I abandoned so many things because I had a dream. I wanted to be one of the few who could stand on the top of the mountain and say I wrote a Great American Novel.

It was only in the last few years that I looked deeper and realized what I should have been doing all of that time. While it is true that I have spent most of my life loving and hating writing, I have also spent just as much time thinking about regret. I regret plenty of things, especially from my teen years, and decided that maybe putting those regrets on paper might help others look at their own lives a little differently.

Accounting For Glory is solely about my regrets. No, I was not the subject of a mysterious crush, but I did not, at all, take my future seriously as a high school student on the verge of college. The importance of my decision making was lost on me. I was sailing headlong into fog and had no clue if there was a whirlpool or a paradise waiting on the other side.

When I first began the Best Medicine series, Remedy was older than she ended up being. She was sixteen and was more of an actual – but unofficial – counselor/therapist/psychiatrist than she is now. I liked the idea of kids sitting on a chaise or a couch and telling another kid their problems and working to find solutions together. Then, just like clockwork, I abandoned the concept. I was drowning in the backstory of how a teenage girl could end up in such a position without constant adult interference. The stakes felt too high. I didn’t want high stakes. I wanted light and fluffy. Actually, I wanted stakes that readers could latch onto without feeling overwhelmed. So I aged her, and her ‘clients’ down. Lowering the age helped lower the stakes and lowering the stakes helped remove the nagging thought that adults should be more involved. The original version of Remedy had office hours and a safe full of notes. The new Remedy has little more than empathy and an old stack of doctor’s notes.

Who Are You?

If you’ve made it this far, then maybe you are exactly the kind of person these books are for. You might be a kid in middle school or high school. You might be a parent of that kid. You might just be an adult like me that looks back on those years with regret and wants to relive them vicariously through the stories of Winston & Glory or Remedy & Will. You might be sick of going to your local bookstore or library and seeing the Middle Grade and Young Adult sections overran with tales of dystopian futures and magical fantasies (not that there’s anything wrong with those stories). You might not want to save the world. You might just want to chill in the cafeteria with your friends and debate what the thing on your tray actually is and whether or not your English teacher knew what she was doing when she paired you up for a project with your super-secret crush but without telling your friends that you actually do have that super-secret crush. It’s just a whole big thing, really.

No, But Who Am I Really?

Fine. I’m a 39 year-old from the mountains of western Maryland. I have a wonderful wife and an army of cats. I am not a bestseller. I am not an award-winner. I have never been recognized for anything by anyone. Maybe some day one of those things will change. Much like Winston, I occasionally journal. Much like Remedy, I am only trying to help.