I discovered that I could write well way back when I was in fifth grade. Nonetheless, being a Sputnik baby, I decided to go to MIT and become an engineer.
Plan A ended with my first two very difficult engineering classes. There was a war on, and a draft, so I went to Plan B: Stay in school and major in political science. This worked well until I graduated and tried to answer the question, “What do I really want to be when I grow up?”
I returned to school, this time in journalism at Missouri. Shortly after graduation I started working at the University of Washington, where I spent the next 35+ years.
Some things at work always struck me as funny (humor was my coping mechanism for dealing with stress). And when I’d try to explain these things to people outside the university, they often struck them as funny, too. So in my final few years of work an idea for a story stuck in my brain: Wouldn’t it be funny if ….? It wasn’t something that did happen, but it might’ve. Maybe. Possibly. Probably not.
That’s the genesis of Ivy is a Weed.
I’m still living in Seattle with my wife. Our son, his wife and our grandson live on the other side of the country.
Now I am hard at work on my second novel, as different from Ivy as it could be.