I found out in the third grade -- because I had bad penmanship.

We were learning cursive and I was pitiful -- messiest handwriting in class. This was 1964...writing on those wide tablets with the dotted line in the center. I was the only kid in my class with homework.

I had to fill a page every night. I copied from a book and it was drudgery. I couldn't watch TV until I was done and the task lasted longer than most of the shows I wanted to see.

Until the night I wrote what was in my head. I was done in like ten minutes and looking at the completed page utterly flummoxed by how it had filled up so fast.

That was the night I learned I was a writer.

My parents were big on having a backup plan. This is not a condemnation. They both grew up poor, scrapped for everything they ever got. The idea that one of us could be an author was simply too alien to contemplate. They did instill my tenacity which is why I'm here today, but I turned my back on writing until I was in my thirties.

Then I started trying to write a novel in the mid-eighties with no idea how to do it.

Attended my first writers conference in 1987 where I met Max Allan Collins, my favorite writer then (and now). He told me I didn't suck that bad and I was hooked.

I sold my first short story in 1992, the same year I quit my day job. I have been writing professionally ever since. My mentor, Collins, became my writing partner and we've been collaborating since the late nineties, first on short stories, then a bunch of stuff for CSI and a whole bunch of stuff since.