I was born in Winnipeg, and live there still. After high school I went to university and worked towards a degree in science, then later two degrees in education. I became a teacher and over the years have taught the gamut from elementary school to university.

As a youngster I loved reading. We didn’t have many books in our home and most of them were adult-oriented non-fiction books so I read those over and over. I especially liked stories about real people and their adventures. Although my life was pretty tame, I imagined myself tagging along, involved in their exciting quests, facing danger at every turn. That interest in real-life situations continues today and shows up in my writing. I tend to choose topics that involve people and the problems they face.
I think I’ve been a writer all of my life, but not in the sense most people imagine. As a young boy, I liked the feel of paper and the look of print on the page. I doodled a lot, drew cartoons and kept a journal for a while. When I was about 9 years old, I asked for a toy printing press for Christmas. I didn’t have any special plans for it, but when summer came a friend and I embarked on a money-making project. Our plan was to spy on our neighbours, gather juicy facts and stories about them then use the printing press to publish a newspaper that we could sell back to the same neighbours. We abandoned the project when we realized how much work was involved in setting the type on the printing press. That was my first real writing-publishing experience and not a very successful one, but perhaps it hinted at better things to come.

I stumbled into professional writing almost by accident. One day, after I’d been teaching for a number of years, I picked up a magazine while waiting for haircut and spotted an ad for a correspondence writing course. On a whim, I clipped out the ad and enrolled in the course. One of my first assignments was to write a non-fiction article for children. It wasn’t the kind of writing I really wanted to do. I envisioned myself as a fiction writer and I thought the assignment would be too simple and boring. I was wrong. Once I started doing research for the article I was hooked. I enjoyed uncovering new facts and found that expressing them in an interesting and easy-to-understand way for others was quite a challenge.
The writing course led to my first published book, The Serendipity Effect, a collection of stories about accidents, mistakes and coincidences that led to breakthrough discoveries in science. Later the book was reprinted under its new title, Accidental Discoveries. Since that first book, I’ve published others. Many contain stories about the adventures, deeds and problems of real people, much like the type of material that I devoured so readily as a boy.

Facts that might interest you:

• My father and brother are amateur inventors and have a knack for creating useful things out of nothing. I, on the other hand, am a klutz when it comes to gadgets. Growing up with two inventors made me realize that everything we create or use has a story behind it, and while I might not be able to invent these things myself, I could write about them. Not too surprising, several of my books are about inventions.

• I write early in the morning before the hustle and bustle of the day. When I have time, I walk to a coffee shop near my home. I find that it’s the perfect place to write because there are few distractions. Best writing times for me are from 6:30 to 9:00 a.m... I usually save research for the afternoons and evenings.

• I love to travel, and have toured many places in North America. Sometimes I do research along the way and sometimes ideas for books come from my travel experiences. On one trip to Colorado, my wife, our two children, and I became lost on a mountain hike. We wandered for hours, looking for a way back to the main trail. We thought we were goners until we stumbled upon a creek that eventually led us back to our starting point. That narrow escape made me think about survival and eventually led me to write Survivors: True Death-Defying Escapes, a collection of stories about people who had narrow escapes of their own.

• Hiking, biking, and stained glass are other interests of mine. So is woodworking. I have a little shop in my basement where I churn out projects from time to time. Woodworking might be an inherited interest. My father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all carpenters so I think it must be in my blood.