Rowe recently left the coastal town of Winchester Bay, Oregon where he owned a 51 foot commercial fishing boat called the Ceres. He worked at a big box home store in Portland, Oregon before finally taking on the mantle of full-time author.
He was a nuclear power plant operator serving aboard the USS Norfolk, SSN 714, in the U. S. Navy. He went on to become a power plant operator and then Plant Operations Supervisor in the civilian world, and now has downsized from the mainstream in order to partake in his life-long dream of writing.
Rowe says of himself:
I’m writing all of the time. I may not be sitting at the computer with a document open, but I’m thinking about my characters and their issues, and how to resolve their problems all of the time. I started ‘thinking’ about "Paradigm Lost, Jamari and the Manhood Rites, Part I" FIVE years before I ever wrote down a single word. I talked about it with friends and partners. In my life, I relate things that happen to me as a gay man to what those events would feel like to the characters in my novel. When I finally sat down to put it all ‘on paper’, I had the bulk of it completed in three months and then spent the next 4 months polishing, cutting, pasting, etc.
As I have completed several novels, the next one is growing in importance with each passing day that I spend on promotions and the ‘business’ side of this endeavor. The characters are beginning to haunt my dreams at night. “Where are you?” they want to know. “When are we coming out again? When do we get to start the next adventure?” A couple seem to sense that things aren’t going to go well for them. They seem to be offering other options . . .
I have had a difficult time in applying my work to any specific genre. It contains elements of Post Apocalypse (Dystopian), Science Fiction, Survivalist, Fantasy, Spiritual, LGBTQ and even a bit of Naturalist. What I really set out to do was to allow readers to see culture in a new way; to see sex in a new way, perhaps even to develop their own understanding of the beauty of that very human endeavor. The secondary goal was to make homosexuality normal. In order to accomplish these two goals I had to build a society that had discarded our current taboos and strictures. I had to destroy the culture I was raised up in and then create an entirely new culture from scratch.
How long have I known I was going to write? I thought I would want to write as far back as 7th grade. I enjoyed reading so much that I actually got reprimanded for reading in class at times. I suspect if I had been reading the text assigned it would have been okay, but, I was addicted to fiction early and upgraded to Science Fiction early in High School. I wrote many short stories and poems in H.S. I won several writing contests and was given a scholarship to college based on my writing. The most important thing I ever heard about writing though was that I needed to live a little bit before I would have anything interesting to say. In retrospect, I always could say something accurately and with flair, but, I did need to live a little in order to develop my story-line and know how to present it so it gets the attention it deserves.
