After trying to convince his parents that he was really a refugee left here by visitors from another world, Mark gave up dealing with reality and started writing fiction in the form of comics and later stories without pictures. His unearthly condition is discernible by his lack of interest in most sports, his dislike of corn on the cob, an inability to find humor in sitcoms, and an allergic reaction to country and western music. Also, he finds beer…something to be avoided. When everyone around him experienced paroxysms of euphoria from the Beatles, Mark gravitated intuitively to Switched-On Bach and Gershwin. This peculiar aversion to pop culture had a serious affect on his social life, but in retrospect he cannot complain: instead of making the usual foolish choices and mistakes growing up, he made others which later proved useful in his fiction. He got used to being regarded as odd, though he is still trying to figure out how to turn that into a virtue. Naturally, all this meant he was either going to fall into a life of disreputability and light embarrassment or become a writer. In hindsight, the results seem logical and quite organic: he became a writer. Author of the Secants Sequence and assorted others and 80 short stories, his most recent novel is Granger's Crossing, a historical.