I was born and raised on the edge of Dallas, Texas, in a neighborhood just far enough from anything to not be considered big city but too close to anything to be considered rural, which I sometimes feel is a poetic description for my personality. I spent my childhood making up stories in the backyard or making up songs anywhere else.  Somewhere along the path of youth, my childhood best friend, who was a co-creator in many of these backyard, plastic lightsaber-wielding affairs, told me that I should turn our adventures into books. Looking back, I’m not sure how serious my middle school buddy could have been, but I could not have been more serious.  In spiral notebooks, I recorded the great adventures our young imaginations afforded us. These spirals are (thankfully) lost to time, but a seed had been planted in my young, ambitious heart.

On the brink of high school, another friend came along for a brief time, an aspiring journalist, who introduced me to the wonderful world of Rick Riordan and the YA fiction genre, which is where I would find my true love for literature and storytelling.  Few people have made such a lasting impression on me as this friend in the very short time I knew her, and it was in that friendship that writing, simply a hobby at the time, became something I realized I could make into a career.  I joined writing clubs, connected with other like-minded creatives, became a (more) voracious reader, and set myself on a course I thought was clear.

Of course, in a blog introduction, it makes sense to talk about the young writer. I would be bereft, however, to ignore the other passions which got me to where I am today. In love, as I was, with the written word, I was also in love with music, songwriting, and theatre. In 2017, blasting “Defying Gravity” at six in the morning, I left home for Springfield, Missouri to pursue a music degree. During the next four years, while I did take a creative writing elective and find my literary community, the written word took a back seat to arias, choral compositions, and late nights in the theater.

The best thing I got out of college, however, was a beautiful wife. I got married in October of 2021 and took on a new adventure being a husband, member of the workforce, and still, stubbornly, a dreamer. In 2023, opportunity took me and my wife 45 minutes south to Branson, Missouri, which is first the Midwest’s armpit and second its entertainment capital.  I spent next year and a half riding and performing for the Dolly Parton’s Stampede dinner show.

Leaving the Stampede was a leap of faith, and my reasons largely inform the direction of this blog. To completely oversimplify, I loved my horse and my cast, but the Branson performance scene left me no control over my life and body and placed me under corporate powers who didn’t have my interests even in the back of their mind. I had been working constantly at 100% for 18 months, and I was burned out, not just from the Stampede, but from nearly every thankless job I’d held up to that point in my life. I couldn’t fathom giving up control of my life to an employer once again, and the solution seemed to be becoming my own boss.  

That’s a long-winded way of saying this isn’t just a lifestyle blog covering a diverse range of topics surrounding my everyday life and goals.  This blog is a rediscovery of passion, of a love for creating and for the arts.  It’s content is broad on purpose, because the world truly lies before me, as I believe it does for you too, the reader, and us together.