When he was eleven years old, Ken borrowed his sister’s copy of S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. After finishing the book, he knew that he wanted to be a writer. At the age of twenty, Ken joined the Fort Worth Police Department. He was the youngest officer on the force, too young in fact to buy bullets for his gun. After retiring from the department, Ken moved to Washington State with his daughter Sarah. While in Washington, he started to get serious about his writing. Ken now lives in Fort Collins with his wife, four daughters, and a ghost named Mary Bell. In 2009, his novel Self Crucifixion was a finalist in the Pacific Northwest Writer’s Conference contest. He is currently at work on a new novel.

Read an excerpt from The Devil’s Lament, Ken’s novel in progress:

A soft, probing wind blew cool across his face tickling the flesh. He absorbed this small mercy as the drought stricken land absorbed a smattering of rain. Within an hour, the killing sun would return, bringing irrepressible heat. Samael sat with his back against the hard bed of the Model T pickup. The truck lurched along the road, shaking and sputtering like a dying man.
He stared into the pre-dawn sky where the sun ascended over the veiled horizon, casting an orange glow that divided the heavens into three distinct layers. Above the narrow orange strip a band of indigo separated day from night, and in the upper reaches of the sky, stars flickered against the blackness like signal fires. He searched the dark canvas with knowledge of a world beyond man’s vision, where his kind bathed in God’s presence. As he recalled his home, a dull ache settled inside his chest, for he considered all memories devices of torture. These moments of quiet reflection reminded him of his aloneness, and for a fleeting second he tasted her warm, moist lips and felt her velvety skin. A fragile sense of hope sparked inside him, and then he remembered Paris and Helen’s final embrace as they overlooked the burning city, and wondered if all love was doomed to end in tragedy.