This is one of the first questions asked in The Creator's Craft. The current answer is not as complete as it is in the book, simply because I haven't died yet.

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I grew up in Hamilton, Ohio, and I am a graduate of Miami University with a Bachelor of Arts in English, a Bachelor of Science in Education, and a Master's Degree in Counseling.  My entire professional career was focused on helping students to graduate who were at risk of doing so.  I worked with students as Coordinator of Basic Skills at Miami, Director of Learning Assistance at the University of Dayton, and finally as a teacher for Mound Street Academy within the Dayton Public Schools system.  I am now retired.

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I have also had a career as a professional songwriter, beginning in 1988 and continuing until the present day.  I was a staff songwriter for a Nashville music publisher for three years, and my songs are actively being pitched in Nashville and elsewhere with a positive reception within the industry.  My entire active catalog is linked down below.

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In 1996, I attempted to write a song in the tradition of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" about how red and green became the colors of Christmas.  I "mapped" the lyric by writing down the storyline itself, and then realized that I had not a song but a children's book.  I continued to work with it for several years and finally self-published the book on Amazon in 2016.  I submitted it to the Purple Dragonfly contests and won two awards, the Dragonfly and the Royal Dragonfly.  I am working with my son Michael on another children's book, and I have a third in mind based on a song by a fellow songwriter.

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Even before that in 1993, I began toying with the concept of God as Artist, trying to understand the acts of creation using principles of art and craft.  My readings then moved to apology (formal, reasoned defenses of faith and religion) and then to quantum physics.  Along the way, I became fascinated with Randy Alcorn's book Heaven, along with his other works of fiction based on his concepts about heaven and angels.

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The result was, first, a draft manuscript of The Creator's Craft, which at that stage was only an attempt to bring concepts of artistic craft to the Bible.  I soon realized that approach was not feasible by itself.  It was reading about fractals that first brought me to the sciences and, ultimately, quantum physics.  I abandoned the first draft of my book and then wrote 14 more versions over the years up to July of 2020.

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About a year prior to my retirement from teaching in 2024, I submitted the manuscript to a Canadian publishing company.  The response was very positive, and that company actually kept the book under consideration for two years, finally returning it with regrets because they felt that they could not do it justice given that they were a small press.  My daughter Erica then found Wipf and Stock and suggested I submit it to them.  Wipf and Stock published the book in December of 2025.

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Visit the website for The Creator's Craft at www.creatorscraft.net.