Biography
I
was a teenager during the 1960s after my privileged (not because we were rich--we
weren't at all) Connecticut childhood. The stuff that was happening all around
me--sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll-- was, thanks to my mother, not a very big deal.
I mean, I loved it, but I think it meant more to people who came from normal
repressed bourgeois suburban or provincial middle-class backgrounds. For them,
it was major life upheaval, rebellion, liberation. I never really had to bust
out the way so many of my contemporaries did, because my mother was such a cool
person, certainly sexually liberated, very hip, and so were so many of her friends,
people I knew when I was growing up. Because of her influence, I could spot
fascinating people a mile away. I went to art school in Boston, but I was pretty
immature and not ready to buckle down and work, so I didn't last long, and within
a couple of years I migrated west, for reasons you'll find in my book. Had to
get away from Connecticut, even though I loved it. It's complicated. I spent
my 20s in Boulder, Colorado, leading a hand-to-mouth, cash 'n' carry hedonistic
artist-type life, taking peyote in the mountains and running around irresponsibly.
It was fun, though, let me tell you. I sold a little art and did a lot of housepainting
for a living. By my late 20s the charm of slinging ladders and buckets was definitely
wearing off. I was pushing 30 and felt a vague but persistent urge to get to
work. I still thought of myself as a graphic artist, a painter, and part of
this was because of Alexis' influence. He'd always told me that I had "it."
I left Boulder in the late 70s and migrated further west, to northern California.
That was where I made the switch: I'd always known I could write, but when I
got a job with a local radio station writing up weekly "human interest"
stories, I learned that I could write on command, meet deadlines, and get paid
(scarcely lavish pay at that point, but actual spendable money). The guy who
ran the show I wrote for sent me out to cover anything I wanted to--the odder,
funnier or stranger the better. I covered a male strip show, I went and searched
out inventors and eccentrics living deep in the woods and interviewed them,
I did play and movie reviews. I was banging them out at the rate of one a week,
and before long I actually had a tiny following in the local listening audience.
My fans wanted more, more, more, and so I did this, happily, for a few years.
I accumulated quite a pile of stories, and that was when it kind of dawned on
me: "Hey! I'm a writer!" A couple of years after that a friend who
was a scholar of Chinese language and history got in touch with me and said:
"T'ang history is a goldmine of fantastic tales and characters. Let's pick
one out and write a blockbuster historical novel." We did. My co-author
was Daniel Altieri. We got an outline and sample chapters together for our first
collaborative novel, COURT OF THE LION, got a major agent and sold the book
to William Morrow. We were off and running. We did three more novels together
( DECEPTION, SHANGRI-LA, SHORE OF PEARLS) and I've scarcely picked up a brush
since (too bad--I was a damned good artist). But now I know for a fact that
whether it's on canvas or in words, it all comes from the same part of the brain:
inspiration, the sense of composition and proportion, art. Alexis would be proud.