I was born in California in 1962 in one of the multitudinous suburbs of L.A., and, Since Dad was a career soldier, we moved to Georgia within months. From there, we went to Maryland, and then on to Europe during the height of the Cold War, smack in the middle of NATO. In fact, for you military history buffs, when De Gaulle kicked the North Atlantic Treaty Organization out of France in ’66, my father was the Army exec responsible for removing and storing weapons and missiles and moving personnel and materiél to Germany and other surrounding US-friendly countries.
Interestingly enough, he was never able to retrieve a cache of small rockets and missiles from a certain small French city, so my brother-in-law and his team actually had to go in and get them some 25 years later. Small world.
When I was three, I learned to read. At two years and change, my mother wanted to get me glasses, because I kept bumping into things: chairs, walls, my brother, like that. The doctor told her he couldn’t test me for glasses because I couldn’t read the letters, and to come back when I’d learned to read. Silly man. How was I supposed to learn to read without the glasses?
Where there’s a will, there’s a way, especially when Worthen and Whitney genes are involved. So my mother, giving supplemental teaching (now we call it additional home schooling) to my brother, brought me in in the lessons, and if I stuck my face close, I could actually see the things. So I learned to name the letters and make sounds with them. Six months later I was reading any basic thing you put in front of me, as long as it was right in front of me. Comic books, kids’ stories. Chapter books.
So we went back to the doctor, and he scoffs, “I told you to come back when he learned to read.”
“He can,” my mother replies.
“I don’t just mean identify the letters,” Eye Doctor says. “I mean, actually read.”
“Try him.”
So, defeated, he does. I had my glasses that day.
So began my love affair with the printed page. I started to read voraciously, and my teachers couldn’t believe it on library day when I went straight to “chapter books” that were "too old" for me. “Why don’t you try this,” they’d say. “I read that five years ago, I’d reply. The height of this came on one particular occasion when we were talking about geography and the first question out of Teacher’s mouth was “Where’s Memphis, anyone know?” Duh. “Egypt,” I said. “No,” she corrected me, “It’s in Tennessee.” Well, of course it is, but we were in Europe, so I figured we were talking about Eastern Hemisphere geography. She should have said we were talking about American geography. She actually didn't make that clear until later.
So that night, mom gets a call from her, and she’s all apologetic. Turns out there is a Memphis in Egypt (Imagine!), and I was right all along. I don’t get an apology in class though. When you’re dad’s a Colonel, and the Post teacher gets embarrassed, she gets a little mean. But in the reading circle, while the others took turns, I had finished the Dick and Jane reader — yes, I’m that old! — by the time the others got through with the seventh or eighth page.
I’m not telling you this to brag. Well. Maybe a little. But the point is just that I got an early start.
Fast forward some. I was a bit of a sickly kid, and spent a lot of years in hospitals. Hospitals mean tests, sometimes painful ones, and whenever we’d go home, Mom would take me past the toy store to get a new toy. I’d go right to the books, and get the latest Hardy Boys or Tom Swift. When I’d aged a little, she said, on the way back from one such hospital visit, “Okay, let’s save time and go straight to the bookstore.” This became a longstanding tradition, and I associated new books with hospital visits. I still do, and consider a trip to the bookstore a special treat. I love books, the look and feel of them. I’m proud of my library.
When I was 17, I began my first novel after my first meaningful kiss. Home from a dance with the woman who would become my first girlfriend, Marla Last-name-deleted (It’s German or nordic, and I still can’t spell it), I began City of Death on New Years’ Day at a little before 1:00 in the morning. Of course I knew nothing of plotting, pacing, character, dialogue, or anything else, so the thing is abysmal. It sees the light of day when I periodically make an attempt to clean the garage. But it was a start. and I did finish it. Maybe I'll rewrite it as a YA piece some day.
Fast forward once again. I’m 25, and life and other things have gotten in the way of my writing. Marla has gone to another school, and I’m married with some great kids. But due to a confluence of events, it came back in roughly 1985, and I’ve been writing ever since. I wrote through college, where I earned degrees in Spanish linguistics and the development of ESL materials.
Many years and a divorce later, I met the love of my life, who collaborates with me on occasion and edits my work when she doesn’t. She’s brilliant, and I’d be lost without her. She’s my soulmate and my first reader always. Afterwards, the revised versions go to you. I hope you enjoy the stories. They’re not just for me. They’re for you.
Pick one up on the way home from the hospital.
