About Author

Biography

I was born just north of Boston, Massachusetts. My family moved to the small town of Mansfield, south of Boston, close to Rhode Island. That is where I grew up and enjoyed the woods that were all around my house. I really loved the small woodsy town better than the city life.

I came to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as my savior at the First Baptist Church of Foxboro. I met a wonderful woman at church named Pam, who went to Wheaton College. I dated her for about three years and then we got married. We moved to Sarasota FL and I continued my art schooling at The Ringling College of Art and Design.

After graduating from Ringling, my first child was born. I was working with a mural company but it wasn’t enough to support the family. Nine months after my first child, Pam was pregnant with my second child and we needed to move back to MA to live in my parents’ house with my brother and sister. Things were tight, but it was a blessing from God. I found a job working as a product designer at a trading company.

After five years at the trading company and the week before Thanksgiving, they told me I was being laid off by the end of the year. I found another job as a product designer in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I'm still with that job, and I have five children (four boys and one girl). We homeschool all of them, and we have made a lot of great friends here in South Florida.

Hickory Woods Adventures got its start back in 1992, just before I got married and had been a Christian for a few years. I had always liked cartooning and was just sketching out something that had to do with a dragon and the dark ages. As funny as I am, doing comic strips is hard work. Coming up with new ideas everyday is a challenge, and I wanted it to have good and Godly morals. So, I made sketch after sketch of Snap-Jaw and Bumble (back then I didn't even know what to call Bumble). I even remember going to a comic book convention and bringing a picture of Snap-Jaw and his two evil Brothers, Smolder and Frost-Bite, with Bumble. I got Stan Lee from Marvel Comics to sign it and I still have it today. He told me they looked cute and to not give up. Things didn’t go much farther than that. Time passed, a lot of things changed, and working with these illustrations was put to the wayside. Now I know God’s plan for them was for many years later.

Then in 2006, when my wife and I started to homeschool, our two oldest boys were just beginning to read a lot of books. Though the books were good, I wanted something different. I thought, “Why don't I write a book?” And, I knew right then and there what characters I was going to use. God put the whole story in my head. I had the name "The Hickory Woods Adventures" and in 2007 I wrote the story. In 2008 it sat in the computer most of the time because I didn’t have an editor. My lovely wife, Pam stepped in and she did a great job. I have five more stories in my head, so the adventure will continue. My goal for the books is to give kids interesting stories to read that help point them to the Lord Jesus Christ.