BIOGRAPHY
I was born in Hamilton, Ontario but moved to Thornbury, Ontario early on in life
I learned to ski at Blue Mountain and did a lot of skiing until I discovered snowboarding at which time I sold my skis, bought a snowboard and have never considered skiing again. I also learned how to skateboard and windsurf. I guess from early on I just liked standing sideways on boards.
After high school I attended Carleton University and learned a lot about literature which, as a writer and scriptwriter, I am now trying to forget. Because no matter how you look at it, there is a giant divide between critical reading and writing novels.
During University I spent a number of years DJing (alternative, hard techno, and for a short time jungle) until, one fateful night, a two hundred pound speaker walked its way off the top of the ledge above my DJ booth and almost killed me. I sold my records the next day and moved to Toronto to work in film if at all possible. At first I managed to get a job at a fledgling internet company and then quickly moved to EA Sports where I wrote scripts for announcers in football and hockey games, two sports I’d never played. This doesn’t happen any more, but back then there were hundreds of lines of script written describing balls or pucks moving from one person to another.
During these years I was lucky enough to first intern and then work at YTV working on shows such as ReBoot, and Goosebumps. While an in-house writer I also assisted in the launching of YTV’s first website.
I had always wanted to be a professor, though, so when a part-time position opened at Algonquin College, I moved back to Ottawa where I’d completed my degrees and have been at the college ever since.
Since then I have continued to write ——-everything. Scripts for TV, Animation, Movies (not that anyone wants these, but still), interactive websites, and video games. Short fiction (more than 30 published short stories, one novella, and a couple of poems), novels (13 and counting), and a couple of plays. I’ve worked as a consultant on video games and TV (for instance trying to convince people that it shouldn’t be Private Detective, but rather Private Investigator in one well known and very good Canadian TV series). But most of all I have been teaching. I’ve taught everything from Psychology to Scriptwriting for Video Game design to everyone from nurses to Interactive Multimedia Developers.
So somehow, the thought I had when I was in University that it would be cool to have a career where I taught and wrote, has come to be my reality.
I married a wonderful woman and we have two boys.