I wanted to be the second coming of Jack London. Growing up I had no single answer to the question of what I wanted to be when I grew up, except perhaps, “EVERYTHING!” The first decade of my adulthood was spent hopping from job to job trying to capture a story. During that time I became a decent heavy equipment operator, but I never found the time to hone the skills needed for writing. In truth, I didn’t try to sharpen anything. I worked off inspiration and once that wore off, another stub of a story lay unfinished in a notebook.

I spent a decade working nights as a correctional officer for a state prison system while working days to build a small homestead. My notebooks grew with stubs of stories about the penitentiary and of browsing goats and grazing chickens and of the wildlife that caught my eye, but they were still just unfinished ideas.

I wore down several pairs of boots walking the prison hallway and wore out several pairs of gloves turning abandoned oak shinnery into a homestead. During the first year I lived in an old travel trailer and used a homemade composting toilet and had no air conditioning. I laid my own water line and installed the underground electric lines myself. I built over a mile of fence alone. I cleared brush. I built a road and built a small barn. I raised and sold goats. Fed chickens to predators while trying to have my own eggs.

It was a good life, but it wasn’t where I wanted to be. Sometime in my 30s I sold the goats and started college while still working at the prison. Eventually, I left the prison and became a wildlife technician. That led to my bachelor’s of science in wildlife biology, and then a master’s. Now I’m a biologist working in the rolling plains of Texas, loving what I do, but still dreaming of writing things that don’t include p values.

I am also taking the craft of writing a bit more seriously than in the past. This blog is a way to keep working at turning those stubs of stories into something worth sharing and to keep focus of my long term goal of writing about the world around me.