1959

What shapes an author? Well…

Dave was born in 1959, his dad a WW2 veteran and then police officer, his mom a homemaker and part-time craft junky, as most women were back then. Growing up in Colorado, he had a normal childhood in the 1960’s when GI Joe was tall enough to hang out with Barbie. He loved the days of “The Jackrabbit Special” and Don “The Snake” Prudhome of Hot Wheels fame, Major Matt Mason and non-themed Lego with block heads. Star Trek, Gilligan’s Island, and Bonanza were all still on prime time and when you wanted to talk to Scotty on the Enterprise, you whipped open a tin-foil wrapped matchbox that had a lid attached with masking tape and make the clicking sound with my mouth.

His era was the era of cherry-bomb fireworks, carrying pocket knives to school and rifles hanging in the back windows of pickup trucks. There were barely-used seatbelts in cars with metal dashboards. Nuclear attack was more prominent than destroying the ozone layer by opening Styrofoam containers and trash was burned in a backyard incinerator; every home in Northglenn, Colorado had one. Not saying it was right, it was just life growing up in the 60’s.

With a brother in Vietnam the beginning of the 1970’s were much different for Dave than graduating high school in 1977. The 70’s for Dave was a time of ten speed bikes with rams horn handlebars and the Dallas Cowboys when they were still the Tom Landry/Roger Staubach dynasty.

Guys drove around in Starsky’s red Gran Torino with the white stripe and Dave sang songs like: Afternoon Delight and You Are The Woman. The Eagles and Bee Gees rocked the charts and in 1978 was when he first laid eyes on the lovely Jeanie and secretly hatched a plan to marry her.

The latter 70’s and early 1980’s were a blur of college life, the Reagan era and marrying Jeanie after only 58 days of dating. That was nearly 42 years ago and he and Jeanie are still going strong.

Dave began writing on Big Chief tablets when just a boy; stories of underground grottos filled with creatures ala Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. He gives credit to his parents for not stifling his imagination.

He dabbled in writing through high school and college and early marriage until the itch for getting serious about writing emerged.

The Barn, (credited as his first serious attempt but not published until years later) began around 1994-1995 on yellow legal pads as Dave sat in the back of a semi-trailer awaiting shipments from an auto distribution company he worked for at the time, and was later transferred to floppy disk on a typing machine that only resembled a computer in the ethereal sense.

His first published novel, Altar, was born out of pecking away on his laptop at 4:30 in the morning and needing less sleep at his age. It was a cathartic journey of struggles, conflicts, self-doubt and abandonment for protagonist, Zack Tucker as well as Dave at the time.

The Stormie Lamonica series came next and The Kiddos books followed and several young adult and children’s books blossomed-originally to share with the family and grandkids, but now out to the public.

Life now, consists of working for the Colorado Bureau of Investigation and the State of Colorado as an analyst, loving Jeanie, a father to their five married children and being a grandfather to 15 grands.