About

While I was growing up, my dad would often bring home comic books. A good many of them would be Disney or Walter Lantz cartoons such as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Woody Woodpecker, Andy Panda and Bugs Bunny. This was before the Marvel comics phenomenon that began in 1961; the year that I graduated from high school.

    For awhile, Quaker Oats had a special where they included a card showing how to draw Walter Lantz cartoon characters. That is when I got interested in drawing cartoons. Up until that time, I had been interested in making puppets.

    In my sophomore year of high school, I took a typing class. About then, my parents bought a typewriter and so I got the idea of putting one of my fanciful tales I was always making up into a book. I would often make up stories about an elf that would steal chicken's eggs as a pastime. Though my father was a mechanic by trade, he raised us on a farm and so farm life was the world I was most familiar with.

    My character was called The Little Egg Snatcher. The plot of the story evolved around the Egg Snatcher inventing a robot to steal eggs and how it got foiled when the police thought he was building a secret weapon for the USSR. The story was typed on a half sheet of paper with crayon drawing on the other half and stapled with a thin cardboard cover. Such was my first attempt a publication. In my senior year I stared in two plays, “The Doctor in Spite of Himself” and “Smiling Through”.

    In college, I majored in theater and was part of a puppet group there. I took a course in playwriting and wrote a puppet play entitled The Frog That Roared. It was about a young knave, a half-wit, that ends up saving the princess from an evil sorcerer who changes her into a frog. Yep! Another frog princess story. I also had parts in several of the stage productions there.

    Several years back, I started to write a screenplay using what online helps I could get. After several name changes it became Saga of the Dwarf. Eventually, I got it to the point where it got Recommends from a coverage source and it made it to the semi-finalist stages of three contests. At present, that screenplay has been turned into a book with the female elf wizard as the protagonist of the story. I did that as it became apparent to me that she was really what the series was about.