About Me

I’m a Texan who writes stories with high-octane absurdism, featuring hapless characters who acquire serious enlightenment in an unenlightened, unserious world. My literary influences are John Kennedy Toole, V.S. Naipaul, Helen Fielding, Wu Cheng’en, Louis Sachar, Cao Xueqin, Roald Dahl and David Sedaris.

I was born in the Year of the Rabbit during a fire cycle in Chinese astrology, which is why my publishing name is Fire Rabbit Books.

I've toiled in the North American gulag that is retail and the Kafkaesque hell that is teaching. I've survived encounters with Christmas shoppers, rattlesnakes, overcooked pasta, and the MSS. 

I'm a dollar store linguist and a bumbling traveler. I've trekked across the Gobi desert on an excessively flatulent camel and tumbled dramatically down a hill at the Great Wall of China; I've been mugged by Tibetan macaques on a mountain and seen my life flash before my eyes in Palermo traffic.  

When I'm not pigging out at all the local eateries, I'm usually hiding from the Texas heat in my house with my family and two cats, who observe me reading, writing, attempting to learn classical guitar, and studying languages. 

Pictured: Me on the outskirts of Dunhuang, in the Chinese province of Gansu.