I can still remember, when I was a kid growing up in New York in the eighties, I would forgo Saturday morning cartoons so I could spend my weekly TV allowance on the good stuff, on channel 5 at 3PM. They were 1970’s kung fu movies, with poor acting, ballet-like fight sequences, but great English dubs that made no sense at all. I still remember the Toad in The Five Deadly Venoms, the traitor Ma Fu Yi in The Five Shaolin Masters, and all the vivid characters that spoke out of sync but were good at every weapon you could ever imagine (including one guy who carried around a bench that he sat on for tea, and used to bash people’s heads with).
The Martial Arts epic genre was a recurring theme in my life at the time. My parents and my sister loved to read wuxia novels, and the dinner conversation often revolved around people sealing each other’s meridian points, or delivering chi in a blood transfusion, or swordsmen wiping out each other’s families for revenge. The plot was a lot more intense than Charlie’s Angels, I thought at the time.
I’ve studied martial arts for many years since the first moment I fell in love with the old kung fu movies. I was a martial arts junkie; ready to learn anything I could get my hands on, and eventually, paved the way for me to write about many different styles and disciplines. As my beer belly grew with each baseball game on TV, I became one of the few couch potatoes skilled in six different weapons.
As a teenager, I was attracted to the Art of War, and I often hid in the high school cafeteria studying military classics and the I Ching. It was a decent break from reading The Great Gatsby. I spent my days studying battle formations used in ancient China, but never once entertained the idea of a career in the military. I went to film school instead.
I graduated from New York University majoring in film and television but ended up working in a bank. I published my first martial arts epic, The Legend of Snow Wolf, a full decade after I learned how to calculate the net present value of money, and I have never stopped writing. My first cookbook was published in the fall of 2017, Haute Tea Cuisine, which represents a full year of experiments using artisan teas in French sauces. An instructional book on my unique knife system Yin Yang Blades, was released on June 2018.
Today, I am focused on a four book series titled The Red Crest . I am also planning out my Taoist martial arts teaching system and working on launching a martial arts school someday. Although no longer in combat shape (blame the long baseball games), I continue to write and teach and guide the next generation in martial arts.
