With sharp wit and unapologetic honesty, Kelly is a compelling storyteller, blending humor and humanity like few others.

I always fancied myself a technical writer. I was a paramedic and educator - a "professional explainer," I called it - and never had an inkling of being an author.

Then life intervened in the guise of an unexpected divorce. I came home from a teaching engagement to find half my possessions gone and a "Dear Kelly" note on the coffee table. My wife had left me for another man, and I never saw it coming.

I was prey to some very dark thoughts in the months that followed, and as I worked nights on an ambulance I hauled out my laptop and started writing just to divert my mind from the turmoil in it.

One story became another, and then another, and soon I had a dozen stories compiled from the first ten years of my EMS career.

My EMT partner eventually snatched my laptop away and started reading. She read for two hours, laughing aloud in some places, crying in others, all while I pretended not to notice or care about her reaction.

"This is really good,"she urged. "You should get it published."

I was too naive to know that nobody publishes their first novel that easily, so like the proverbial bumblebee blissfully unaware of his aerodynamic insufficiency, I soon had a publishing contract with the second person to ever read my writing, a friend who who had just started his own medical publishing house. 

That book became En Route: A Paramedic's Stories of Life, Death and Everything in Between, and has since spawned a sequel, many short stories and anthologies, and more works to come.

Along the way, I found my tribe among the authors and fandom of sci-fi and fantasy cons, and when I am not prowling the seamy underbelly of the city in search of little old ladies who have fallen and can't get up, you can find me at an EMS conference or scifi con, holding court in the hotel bar, telling and listening to stories, and laughing myself silly. Thanks for reading.