About

I’m the author of the climate fiction series, The Steep Climes Quartet, a book series with the first title, Kill Well, published in September 2023, and the second book, Dear Josephine, published end of March 2025. For more up-to-date information about the series, check out The Steep Climes Quartet posts on this site, or even better, sign up to on the “Contact” page to receive news and new posts.

I worked in book publishing as a developmental and acquisitions editor before shifting my focus to digital publishing, long serving as a journalist and editor for electronic publishing trade periodicals, and as a consultant and electronic publishing business and technology analyst, including working with start-ups such as Tony Fadell’s Fuse, Intertrust Technologies, and NetMarquee.

I have a long interest in climate issues, including going back to my ninth grade class project writing and filming a short documentary with a classmate on pollution and greenhouse gases. And, no, it isn’t that I was some prescient youngster back in 1970 or 1971, but rather that this only proves we’ve long known about the risks of climate change.

While undertaking a deep energy retrofit of my house in Berkshire County, I combined my background in digital technologies and my growing understanding of building science and house renovation and retrofitting processes to found Retrosheath, a start-up that aimed to reduce cost for energy efficiency improvements in the built environment.

Well, in my case, what starts up, does shut down, and I turned to writing The Steep Climes Quartet (which for years went by the working title, The Troubles, at least until an Irish-American friend of mine convinced me that I needed a different title!). The writing start of this series more or less coincides to me finding myself behind bars, by which I mean I spent the next eight years working as a bartender and bar manager. While that’s sure enough hard work, it was also fun, including developing bar programs such as crafted classic cocktails and, in my last gig, building a 137 selection American Whiskey List, and holding TalkTails, a talk and tasting program.

One of the best aspects of bartending–besides meeting a lot of interesting people and making new friends–is that the job is over when the shift ends. The sorts of professional work I’d pursued in earlier years tended to be all-consuming, or at least consuming enough to allow little time for writing fiction.

I still live in the Berkshires, writing, working with Averosa Records as digital marketing consultant, and tending my vegetable garden.

I’ve been writing for a long time, both as a trade journalist and as author of critical essays, fiction, and poetry. One of these days I’m going to get good at it.

A recent trip to Seattle was in large part aimed at exploring the Happy Hour scene in craft cocktail bars. This photograph is from that trip, next to a doppelganger, taken at the Seattle Museum of Art, because I like to drink in culture, too.