A regular guy with an unusual road into fiction.

Imagination came first.

I did not grow up expecting to become an academic or a novelist. My dad left high school, served in the Navy, and later worked as a welder and in mining. My mom earned an associate degree. We were a regular working family in southern Arizona, and I was mostly just trying to figure out what my life could look like.

What I did have very early was imagination. My grandpa helped kindle it. On his back patio, badminton rackets could become fishing poles and the backyard could hold whales. He read me Greek myths, fables, stories about heroes, books about animals and nature, and some of my Raggedy Ann and Andy books. He was the person who first took me to the library, along a little path from where he lived that felt secret and magical to me.

He died from a brain tumor on my ninth birthday. I had prayed hard that he would make it to my birthday, and I still believe, in my own way, that he was there. I only had him for a short part of my childhood, but what he gave my imagination never really left.

After that, ordinary places kept becoming other worlds. A ditch near my house could be a castle moat one day and a World War I trench the next. I had vivid, recurring dreams, and years later some of those dreams began finding their way into my writing.

Writing itself took longer. Physical therapy often pulled me away from English class, so grammar and punctuation were not the parts of writing that came most naturally to me. I had ideas, but I also had a lot of self-doubt. I kept thinking I had things I wanted to get out of me, but maybe I was not technically good enough to do it.

Eventually the answer became simple: just get it out. Start. Go for it.

School helped me build confidence. I discovered anthropology, then moved through counseling, human relations, and general psychology. My education has felt less like a straight line than a pinball machine: I get hit in another direction, discover something new, and somehow keep adding points. By the time I finished doctoral work, I had written enough that even when I could not name every grammar rule, I had developed a feel for when something worked.

Strength is more complicated than it looks.

I grew up with an actual hero in my family: my Uncle Dale. I knew him as a Vietnam-era Air Force fighter pilot who had gone on to do remarkable things, but what impressed me most was that he did not spend his life bragging about them. He could play the piano, sing the songs of the military branches, tell great stories, cook, ranch, and make a kid from a small Arizona town think the world was much bigger than it seemed.

He was also human. He struggled with alcohol and fought that battle too. One of the stories I remember most strongly was not about a medal he was proud of, but about a mission he regretted and a ribbon he refused to wear afterward. That stayed with me. Ability and courage matter, but conscience matters too.

He eventually received the Arlington burial he had wanted. In March 2025, I made a trip I once would have assumed was impossible for me and stood at his grave at Arlington National Cemetery. I have been to places I consider sacred; Arlington belongs in that category for me. Standing there, surrounded by the cost of service, was overwhelming.

Those ideas are part of how I think about heroes. I am an Eagle Scout. Service has always mattered to me. But I no longer think heroism means being invulnerable or always having the answer.

Being a hero sometimes means being willing to be rescued yourself.

Dan Campbell contains parts of me, but he is not me. In many ways, he is closer to an alternate eighteen-year-old version of me: serious, intense, loyal, and very black-and-white about right and wrong. At eighteen, I wanted the world to fit cleanly into categories. Age, relationships, study, failure, and experience have taught me that there is more gray than I once wanted to admit.

That is one of Dan's flaws. At first he can look almost too disciplined to be flawed, but his need for rules and certainty can become a way of avoiding the messier work of living. He has to learn that strength is not the same thing as control, that good people can be wrong, and that admitting weakness does not erase courage.

I want readers to finish a Rectify story thinking about how they can be better, serve someone else, protect people who need it, and rethink what bravery actually means. Hope and purpose are themes that keep showing up in nearly everything I do. I also want readers to close the book and think, I want to see this on a big screen—or as an anime.