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True Crime writer, blogger.

Look for my work in RADAR Magazine (www.radaronline.com).

This is my site:

The True Crime Weblog.

This is my Tumblelog:

THINGS YOU MAY NOT KNOW ABOUT YOUR FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD CRIME BLOGGER

• I'm a history buff. This shows up on occasion in my crime blogging, but never in the professional writing I've done so far. Specifically, I'm fascinated with WW II, the Civil War, the Lincoln Assassination, anything to do with Thomas Jefferson, and the period between 1890 and about 1933 in American history. Personal histories of average, everyday people fascinate me -- I once found in a box at an antique store a little notebook a law student had kept in the 1880s. He'd not used much of it, but on one page he'd very carefully inserted a 4-leaf clover. Even after more than 100 years, the clover retained some green. I still kick myself when I realize again that I lost that notebook during a move.
• I am 6'0", but I have size 8.5 EEEE feet. My father, from whom I inherited those bizarrely wide feet, used to call me "wedgefoot."
• You can't tell it from this profile pic, but I still have hair. I grow it out now, in fact. I'm thinning on top, but I can live with it.
• I hate to shave, but usually do it a few times a week.
• I semi-sorta collect colognes, and I have tastes beyond my means. I admit it.
• I do listen to a lot of NPR in the car, but most of the MP3s on my digital playlists are popular music. With... er... some country and gospel thrown in, on occasion.
• My wife loves rock n' roll and knows her rock history inside out. To her, I am a dork, musically -- based not on the classical stuff (which she also likes) but the pop I listen to.
• I should have a much thicker southern accent than I do. Stage training drummed a lot of it out of me.
• If I can't watch certain cartoons during the week, I swear I get a little grumpy.
• I've had Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd memorized since I was 13, and I have yet to actually be in a stage production of the show.
• For years I was embarrassed about the fact that I liked to read true crime books. I'd been blogging for about 3 years when I started wondering what the hell I had to be embarrassed about. So I told anyone listening about my "dark interests" in certain literature, and within a few months I was setting up a crime blog. Now, rather than leaving the moment another person comes into the true crime section at the bookstore, I'm more likely to plop on the floor and browse through a book.
• Two early ambitions -- like, 1st and 2nd grade early -- becoming a professional baseball player or a writer. I'm pretty sure the time for the baseball thing has passed, but the writing...
• I have to restrain my tendency to compare crimes I write about to opera plots. Few people in the U.S. would get it, I'm afraid. But those comparisons are constantly fluttering through my brain.
• I nearly flunked my senior year in high school. The reason? Math class, of course.
• I nearly flunked out of my freshman year in college. The reason? Math class.
• Since I entered my 30s, I've become fascinated with mathematics and the inherent beauty in higher math, how it dovetails with the very structure of the world around us. I've read books on the Golden Ratio (phi), quantum physics, quantum entanglement, you name it. Go figure.
• I hate the phone. It's almost phobic. But I'm working on that.
• When my mom first bought a computer in the mid-80s, I realized quickly that I couldn't figure the damned thing out (it was a Commodore 64). So it gathered dust for a bit, until mom decided it had to be put to SOME use, fired it up herself, and in time became the family computer expert. In the last company where she worked before she retired, my mother was the in-house trainer. She also went from being an accounting clerk at that company when she was hired to the acting chief financial officer when she retired.
• I guess I caught up with the whole computer thing, after all.
• I'm kind of a mama's boy.
• That said, my brother taught me to fight, and among his friends (truckers, bikers, you name it) he was perhaps one of the most storied brawlers around. I never lost a fight in school, and I still have to govern the side of me that likes a good fight -- an argument, or a brawl. It's a boy thing, I think.
• Once upon a time I was a pretty decent chess player. But you have to keep up with that, and just about anyone could probably beat me now.
• I do like cats. I've cried over losing some cats I've had as pets. But to be perfectly frank, I'm a dog person. My kids aren't the only ones looking forward to the day when we can have a dog around the house.
• No one in my household is neat, but I have moments. Usually these come when I'm dealing with some sort of writing block or just feeling anxious. I don't have a middle gear neatness-wise, so whatever I clean is usually spotless. And then sometimes ignored again, for months. The only person here who shares this tendency is, bizarrely, my 6-year-old daughter, who will use baby wipes to clean door facings and the bottom of the refrigerator.
• I've been dealing with a noticeable hearing loss in my left ear for most of 2007. It has not affected singing as badly as I feared it would, but it hasn't been fun, either. Some type of hearing loss appears to run in my dad's family, usually setting in after age 40.
• In the past, I've had to govern a tendency to impulse buy either watches or shoes. I have no idea why, but it started in high school.
• My parents are my heroes, and pretty much always have been. Both of them are saints, in my book. As a parent myself, I doubt I'll ever live up to the example they set.
• I'm pretty sure I had a mild version of something called body dysmorphic disorder (bdd) in high school. I'd been fat in elementary and middle school, but through exercise I buffed up in high school. Photos prove it. But I can vividly recall looking in the mirror back then and seeing nothing but the fat parts. Funny enough, at 40, the only reasons I'm worried about being fat are my cholesterol and blood pressure. Otherwise I'd be fine where I'm at. And that's kind of fat.
• I'm very sorry to everyone who thought high school was a living hell, but I had a pretty good time in high school. Any real trouble I had there was usually of my own making. For me, middle school was the real hell, and there were times in my first 4 years of college that weren't so great. High school, though -- overall, pretty fun.
• Speaking of fat -- I could probably eat the exact same thing for breakfast and lunch every day for the rest of my life and not be bothered. But dinner is totally different. I doubt I'm too different from a lot of guys that way.
• I grind my teeth in my sleep sometimes, and have been doing it since I was a kid. All my kids have done it, at some point. It's done a number on my dental health, to say the least.
• Also in the sleep category -- this actually may be somewhat well-known, but I'm a lifelong insomniac. I was only 7 when Saturday Night Live premiered, but I watched it. I had no idea what most of the humor was about, but I recall giggling into my blanket so my mom & dad wouldn't get up and take away my TV for staying up so late.
• This is really stupid, but I shed a tear when Johnny Carson retired from The Tonight Show.
• The home and property where I grew up in Nashville, TN now make up the campus of a Coptic Christian Church and School. I feel certain that's one of the stranger fates for anyone's old homestead that I've ever heard of.
• My sister and mom speculated that they were terrorists at the old place until I said that I was pretty sure that Coptic Christians don't get along too well with Muslims.
• I'm not sure what prompted me to write this list, but it was an interesting exercise. I'll probably add to it as I think of stuff.

The mother-effing TECHNOVIKING.

FEEL the power.