I was born in South Carolina, but our family moved to Atlanta when I was five. Although I was too short and scrawny to be much of an athlete, I loved sports and played Little League baseball and football and even managed to make my seventh-grade basketball team as a bench-warmer and cheerleader for the starters. My love for writing led me to take journalism courses at Georgia State University. My first big thrill as a real "journalist" came when I saw my name at the top of a four-paragraph story for the school's newspaper. My first real job as a journalist was writing a column for a small-town weekly, reporting on the Braves, Hawks and Falcons for a whopping $5 per week. Within a few months I had become the news editor and my duties expanded to the point I was no longer writing any sports stories, instead covering city council meetings and local news and feature stories. From there I went to the second-largest weekly newspaper chain in my county as a cub reporter, photographer, then became a branch-office news editor in charge of a busy four-person staff. After a couple of years in the trenches, I was promoted to editor of a dozen local weekly newspapers for the same chain and then, after living on less-than-livable wages for 10 years, became the owner and co-publisher of my own rival weekly broadsheet newspaper in a nearby town. This labor of love grew from a 4-page start-up into a thriving 20-page paper in the next few months, but problems with my financial partner brought an end to the business. Since then I've been involved in a number of endeavors, including graphics design, photography and, most recently, real estate investments in the Atlanta metro area. I've never out-grown my love of journalism and have been an ardent poster on several forums, including more than 1,000 posts on a local Atlanta Falcons "talk about the team" blog.