Meet Michael

Stories have always found me.

I was writing stories before I really knew what that meant. As a young teen, I filled notebooks with characters and worlds that existed nowhere except in my head. A few years later, I moved on to poetry, writing almost every day, for years. Most of it was bad. All of it is still sitting in a binder on a shelf in my office. I’ve never been able to toss it out.

Movies shaped me just as much as the page did. I grew up loving fantasy, and I picked up The Hobbit around age ten. I’ve read it, along with The Lord of the Rings, more than fifteen times. But what pulled me in wasn’t the magic or the monsters. It was the characters. If a story didn’t make me feel something for the people in it, good or bad, it didn’t work for me. That’s stayed true my whole life.

It’s still the thing I care about most in my own writing.

That love of story eventually pulled me into film and video production, where I wrote and produced my own documentaries. I had big ambitions of becoming an award-winning documentary filmmaker. Reality, of course, had other plans. Documentary film-making didn’t exactly pay the bills.

Life moved on. I got married, and my wife Heather and I started raising two kids. Somewhere in those early parenting years, I started a blog called frazzledad.com, documenting the chaos and joy of fatherhood. That was more than eleven years ago, and I’m still writing it today.

For most of my life, writing a novel felt like something other people did. I admired authors, but I never imagined joining them. That changed in my sixties. My first book wasn’t fiction at all—it was a nonfiction guide called Overseas by Design. Publishing it gave me something I hadn’t expected: proof that maybe I’d been wrong about myself.

But the story that had been sitting with me longest started on a camping trip eleven or twelve years earlier. Back then, my nine year old son was really into spy stories. The kind that had boy spies as the protagonist. While sitting around the campfire one evening, we started making up our own story, with the main character as my son, Zachary. It took more than ten years to actually get it onto the page, but this year I finally published Zack Taggart-The Bucerías Anomaly, the first book in that series.

Then my daughter, Beth-Rose, pointed out something I couldn’t argue with. Zachary had his own character. Why didn’t she? I didn’t have anywhere in that book to put her, so that question led straight to my first Lizzie Rose book, then a second, and now a full series taking shape around her.

Somewhere between the notebooks, the poetry, the documentaries, and Frazzledad, I think I was always circling my way back to this: telling stories about people worth caring about. It just took me a while to get here.

I was born and raised just outside Montreal, but I’ve spent most of my life on the West Coast, and the last twenty-one years on Vancouver Island. When I’m not writing, you’ll usually find me hiking, camping, traveling, or enjoying a good craft beer.