Hello and welcome back! If you haven’t already read it, I recommend reading part 1 of this series, where I introduced Who I Am in my own words. And I discussed exactly the intent of these posts. This time, I’ll keep my introduction brief, and jump into what I promised!
Who Are Any of Us?
First, I feel there’s some helpful groundwork by mentioning that I firmly believe we are greatly shaped by our life experiences. However, at this point in my journey around the sun, I’m leaning more towards an 80/20 nature/nurture split. If you’d like to know more about how I can to this conclusion, let me know. For now, just keep that in mind when you consider how I talk about myself and my upbringing. There may not be a test, but it will come up more!
So, without further ado, let’s talk about those mundane aspects of a person.
I Am Florida Man
OK, let’s get it straight right up front. Yes, I was born in 1989 in Florida. St. Petersburg, Florida to be precise. While I’m therefore fine embracing the title of “Florida man” from time-to-time, the reality is that St. Pete is a typical city. I was the third of four children in my household, and I was blessed to be raised by two loving parents. My siblings and I are still close to this day, with my older sister and brother, and younger sister all still gathering on holidays and communicating regularly about our respective families.
One fun fact about my childhood: I was born with a full head of hair, which led a nurse to bring me around the hospital showing me off because of just how much hair I had (simpler times in 1989 I suppose). My wife and son were also blessed with spectacular hair at birth, but now I digress. Let’s talk about where I went from there!
My Journey to Adulthood
Rather than write out paragraphs of information here, how about I try something different. Here are some brief bullet points about my life. As I write future parts of this series, I’ll add hyperlinks to each bullet with links to more details.
- While many kids in the past decade grew up watching Frozen on repeat, Fantasia was the movie for me -I couldn’t get enough as a young child, and still love watching it today.
- I attended private, catholic schools from K-12.
- I started creating the world of Evorath early on in high school.
- I worked at various retail stores during high school and in college.
- I attended University of South Florida in St. Petersburg, where I graduated with a Criminology Degree.
- I started freelancing in my last year of college, building my own small-scale business around writing and marketing.
I suppose that brings me into adulthood, so we’ll cut off the list there. Throughout this series, you’ll hear more about each of these, but if there is a topic you are interested in learning more about, feel free to leave a comment and we’ll see if I can’t satiate your curiosity.
Husband, Father, and Homesteading Author
Of course, this wouldn’t be complete without closing out with some details about my adult life. In 2014, I published the first edition of my first Evorath novel -it was a mistake. I rushed it out and it was NOT professionally done. So, in 2016, the same year I married my amazing wife, I released the new, updated version. This one was much better, but 2016 also saw the collapse of my freelancing business. As a result, my writing career got put on hold. By 2018, I was back in the employee workforce while I continued to learn some new skills. And by 2020, I made the transition to my career in data science.
And yes, I’m still working a full-time job. Currently, I work as an Analytics Manager at a small ad agency. Throughout these changes, I finally got around to finishing my second book, which was released in 2023. And my final book in the Evorath trilogy came out in February 2024, finishing the trilogy that took far too long to write. As of writing this post, I’m writing book 3 of my next fantasy series, The Legends of Evorath; book 1 releases in October of this year, so if you haven’t set a remind for that, now is the time.
Where to Next?
Since this post is already longer than I’d like, we’ll close it out there. Next week, I’m going to take a deeper dive into my childhood. Like I’ve expressed, I want these posts to help you really understand who I am, and what better way to do so than to share those early nurturing moments?
For now, thanks for reading, and God bless!
