I’ve spent most of my life building things.
Businesses. Buildings. Songs. Paintings. Books. A life I’m enormously grateful to have lived.
But creativity wasn’t something I discovered after leaving the business world. It was there from the beginning.
In my twenties, I was a skilled musician and songwriter. Before I was thirty, I already had a hit song under my belt and imagined music might become my life.
Family expectations were considerably more practical. Earn a living.
So music went onto the back burner while I entered construction and business. I became an entrepreneur, pilot and senior executive and spent the next several decades succeeding in a world very different from the one my younger self had imagined.
I was fortunate enough to do very well.
Then, at 57, I let it go.
I didn’t retire from life. I returned to something that had been waiting patiently for me since my twenties.
I returned to creating.
Over the seventeen years since, I’ve written songs and recorded albums. There are still boxes of Road to Somewhere and Win, Draw or Lose CDs in my storage room, along with a stack of Still Breaking Bad vinyl records collecting dust.
I’m proud of every one of them.
I’ve had people of considerable stature in the music business—including legendary songwriters Gary Gentry and Chris Gantry, and publicist to the stars Elaine Nash—give me all the validation I’ll ever need about my ability as a songsmith.
Then I started painting.
A few of my paintings now hang in a classy little gallery. They made the wall. I made the grade.
And then there are the books.
There’s a pile of them on Amazon documenting my writing, storytelling and original cinematic voice and style long before artificial intelligence ever entered my creative life. Children of Pleiades: Rise of the Henge even reached #1 Amazon bestseller status in its category. 
Some of my creative work has been commercially successful. Much of it hasn’t. 
That was never really the point. I had already spent one lifetime building things in the material world. I wanted to spend the next one exploring what was inside me.
Now, at 74, I’m completing the most ambitious writing project of my life.
The Time Triad.
It is an epic trilogy spanning dynasties and centuries, quantum physics and consciousness, time and memory, love and loss, and ultimately the enduring mystery of what it means to be human.
At its heart is Ezra von Steinmeier, a quantum physicist whose encounters with the impossible carry him across time and eventually force him to confront a far greater mystery than time travel itself: the nature of consciousness and the uncertain boundary between the reality we experience and the reality we create.
It has become much more than a time-travel story.
It is the culmination of questions I have been asking for much of my life.
What is consciousness?
What is time?
How much of the present is unconsciously created by the past?
What happens when we finally let go?
And what, if anything, lies beyond the shadow of doubt?
And yes, I have discovered the power of AI. I’m not hiding it. I’m not apologizing for it.
The first two books of The Time Triad grew from manuscripts I began writing in the summer of 2024 and had substantially completed by the end of the winter of 2025, before AI became part of my writing process.
Beginning in 2026, I started using ChatGPT as an editor and creative assistant to help me revise and complete those manuscripts.
With the third book, 626: A Journey Beyond the Shadow of Doubt, the collaboration has become much more extensive.
I develop the story, characters, narrative direction, philosophy and much of the narrative outline. I use AI for research, continuity, editing and to help turn some of those outlines into draft narrative at extraordinary speed.
Then I audit it.
I challenge it.
I redirect it.
I rewrite it.
Sometimes I throw the whole thing out and start again.
And I keep working until the words on the page tell the story I intended to tell.
Why?
Because I’m 74 years old and I still have a lifetime of stories inside me that I want to tell.
I could spend months hunched over a keyboard grinding out every sentence of another novel, consuming precious time and lifeforce while adding unnecessary wear and tear to an aging body.
Or I can bring my characters, stories, experiences, philosophy, imagination and creative judgment to an extraordinary new technology and use it under my direction to accomplish in days or weeks what might otherwise take months.
I choose the latter.
AI didn’t give me my lifetime of experience.
It didn’t write the songs I was writing fifty years ago.
It didn’t paint my paintings.
It didn’t create the books I published before I ever began working with it.
It didn’t invent my voice.
And it certainly didn’t live my life.
What AI gives me is leverage.
And speed.
At this stage of my life, speed matters.
I have more stories to tell than I have years to waste proving that I can type every word myself.
I remain the guy at the gate.
I decide what belongs.
I decide what gets rewritten.
I decide what gets thrown out.
And I decide when the words finally say what I intended them to say.
This is the new reality.
The world is changing. Creative work is changing with it. Artificial intelligence is here, and I’m not interested in hiding from the future or pretending it hasn’t already arrived.
I chose to use it.
And I’m glad I do.