My Bio

Growing up, I loved disappearing into a book. I’d spend hours on my bed reading Science Fiction and Fantasy by Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clark, Larry Niven, Robert Heinlein, Ursula LeGuin, JRR Tolkien, and others. I dreamed of writing a book like those someday. Books kept my life stable and my curiosity fed.

Over time my tastes changed, but my love for reading did not. I brought my books with me to college at University of Missouri-Rolla (now called Missouri University of Science and Technology), where I studied Mechanical Engineering and took as many English classes as I could fit in. I hung with the arts crowd (who seemed far more interesting than the aspiring engineers—sorry fellow tech nerds, it’s true!). Then, common sense be damned (as I was routinely reminded), I applied to PhD programs for English, and was accepted at Indiana University, where I was seriously in over my head.

The books I discovered there, however , were spectacular. My tastes evolved; my SF reading now included Italo Calvino, Stanislaw Lem, and J.G. Ballard, while my Fantasy reading included Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Poetic Edda. I’d entered the program focused on Medieval Literature (yeah, Tolkien) and enjoyed the work. But contemporary literature called more loudly: Don Delillo, Jorge Luis Borges, Toni Morrison, and many, many others.

But I still straddled two worlds: one of technology, specifically computer technology, and one of literature. My doctoral dissertation was a now-quite-unbelievable mash-up of Magical Realism and Virtual Reality that I somehow managed to convince the Indiana faculty to approve. Along the way I met this incredibly smart woman who happened to share my last name: Margot Anne Kelley. She, too, was in English but had a science bent. Our first few dates together, we either went to the bar or hung playing an early text adventure game: Zork. (My first book, Raven, is set in 1990 at MIT. Zork and its text adventure contemporaries, Adventure and Colossal Cave, show up in an early scene in the book!) We married in 1989 and Margot finished her PhD in 1991.

We moved to the suburbs of Philadelphia where she began a faculty position at a small liberal arts college while I finished my mash-up dissertation. I was good with computers, so I figured I could do some part-time computer work as I finished my dissertation. I taught myself Microsoft Windows, then taught it to businesspeople at a local financial services company.

Unfortunately, I became a newly-minted PhD at the beginning of the worst market for academic jobs in the United States in decades. The chances of me getting a job? Not great. The chances Margot and me getting jobs in the same city? Zero. But my part-time work teaching people to use technology had expanded. I learned Microsoft Office so I could teach it. Then the company needed a network engineer, so I taught myself that. I stumbled into a full-time job working for a tech consulting company, taught myself to program, then to lead projects. That turned into a job as an IT manager at a very corporate HR company.

Ah, stability at last. Now, I thought, I could write the novel I’d long dreamed of. I started a science fiction novel that took place on a fictionalized version of the Indiana campus. It was over 140,000 words in the first full draft, and—in retrospect—it was a mess. Despite all that I learned getting a literature PhD, I didn’t learn anything about how to transform a rough draft into a novel. Which soon ceased to matter, as I left the corporate job and moved back into consulting—leaving me no time to write. After a few years working for other folks, a friend and I started our own computer consulting company, LiquidHub, near Philadelphia on January 1, 2001. Although I lacked both the time and the brain space for writing, I never stopped reading. I added new genres to my to-be-read pile, including thrillers. I’ll credit Hunt for Red October and The Firm with introducing me to highly detailed, technical thrillers that a reader could sink their teeth into.

Along the way, we moved to Cambridge, Mass., then continued north to Maine. Over the years, I revisited the SF manuscript I’d started, but I couldn’t get momentum. Finally, in 2018, my business partner and I sold our company, providing me with the mental space and time to pick the book back up.

I knew I needed to learn to more about the craft of writing. I took online writing classes and started attending conferences. I took more advanced classes and got serious about revision. What began as a meandering SF draft became a taut historical technothriller. I landed a publishing contract for that book in 2023, and Raven came out in October 2025.

Writing wasn’t the only thing that I dedicated myself to in that time. I still do executive consulting for companies, bringing the lessons I learned along the way to startups. I co-founded a nonprofit with Margot, the St. George Community Development Corporation, an entity dedicated to serving the people in our small community in Maine. I also began serving on the board of the ACLU of Maine, over time serving as its Treasurer, Board President, and interim Executive Director. I now serve on the National Board of the ACLU as the Maine representative and am part of a committee looking at the impact of Artificial Intelligence on civil liberties.

During the COVID pandemic I challenged myself to do something with that stay-at-home energy and began pursuing another one of my creative dreams: learning to play music. I began with piano, taking weekly lessons (on Zoom at that time) and continuing for several years. In 2025 I picked up my dream instrument—the cello—and am learning that as well.

I’m hard at work on several other books: Critical State (the first in a new series starring tech investigative journalist Olivia Wolfe), and two more Olivia Wolfe novels, Glass Cliff and Q-Day. I also have the beginning of another series with different protagonist, From Away: A Tommy Michaud Novel, underway, and more to come!