Bio, Part II.

I met Erin, my future wife, in Spanish class during our freshman year at Cornell University in 1999, but it was a couple years before we really got to know each other. Our friendship grew, and ultimately it dawned on us that we are in fact soul mates. I also developed a deep interest in Japanese culture, history, and language in college, something Erin and I shared, and we both wound up living in Japan after graduating.

Erin and I have two kids: Zachary, born in February of 2008, and Norah, born in July of 2010.

My career has been focused at the intersection of international travel and education, including stints as a high school English teacher in Japan, a career services assistant in Cornell's business school, and my current role, an immigration and programming assistant at Cornell, where I assist international students, faculty, and staff with immigration and visa issues. Earlier odd jobs: construction worker, camp counselor (I was primarily responsible for the care of animals, not kids), paint store clerk, and intern in a city hall.

I've always been an avid reader (although less so from roughly 2000 to 2006 or so, when my main sources of entertainment were TV, movies, anime, and games). Aside from the writers mentioned in my last post, my favorite authors include Shakespeare, Poe, George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, Orson Scott Card, J.K. Rowling...well, I could keep listing authors all day, but I'll just say the next tier would include Goethe, Terry Goodkind, Haruki Murakami, David Eddings, and Stephen King. For nonfiction, the list would start with Carl Sagan, Jared Diamond, Al Franken, and Michael Moore. My favorite movies include Star Wars (original trilogy), The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Life is Beautiful, Amelie, Braveheart, Pan's Labyrinth, The Shawshank Redemption, and anything by Hayao Miyazaki.

Since about 2007, I've been reading and writing more. I spent a lot of time worldbuilding (in other words, adding details to my world in an effort to make it more convincing and compelling), and reaching a certain level of satisfaction with the results (I won't say completion...I don't think a worldbuilder's job is ever finished), I've moved back to writing seriously. My current projects include a total rewrite of my earlier Tornalia novel, The Dagger of Despair, which I'm planning to turn into a trilogy of Young Adult novels; a just-for-fun-and-practice novel called The Silver Lance; and several short stories, some set in Tornalia and others unrelated.