J. Michael Dolan

I've led an unorthodox life, you might even say a strange one. So prepare yourself for an unorthodox author bio.

A precocious reader from an early age, Catholic-school educated, I succumbed as only a starry-eyed teenager could to the siren song of the late-sixties hippie movement and renounced an academic scholarship my first year in college. When the revolution didn't materialize (doh!), a disillusioned, directionless me drifted from one job, one scene to another. Until washing up like flotsam on the deceptively sun-kissed shore of the land of high-dollar bartending.

Where, ensorcelled by the travel, the women, the glitz, and the lure of undeclared, more than sufficient income, I churned out cocktails for over thirty mostly misspent years in such places as Hawaii, Mexico, the Virgin Islands, and Manhattan's decidedly un-virginal sex-club milieux. Having never stopped reading, though, and by that I mean serious reading, a lot of it literature I'd missed out on in college, I'd begun to dream of being a writer myself. To which end I eventually fled the distractions of the dissolute life I'd been leading for the "green silence and solitude" of rural Texas.

Now I write historical novels laced with an erotica that for the most part shies from the vulgar, it devoted not so much to the physical act of love as the bells and whistles which attend it. In my latest book especially, the adult romance Mrs. Wallenberg, my goal was twofold: that of introducing people to the greatest hero to emerge from the Holocaust, a man, sadly, most have never heard of; and further enrich their lives by exposing them to sexual pathways they might not have thought to take.

But broadening others' horizons isn't my only raison d'etre; I'm not as solitary a scribbler as I made myself out to be. I've a big overgrown puppy to care for now as well, one that some miserable excuse of a human being abandoned on a nearby highway (there were witnesses) who's proven to be the best 60 lbs. of companionship a body could wish for. A dog person from way back, I've had my share of special ones, three beyond special, but none I daresay so intelligent, so bouncy, so beautiful from the inside out as my remarkable Alba, a scrumptious chocolate and white slice cut from the cake of the collie/shepherd breed of her ancestors. To me she epitomizes something I once read: Dogs are like people---with all the bad removed. An adage I'm sure a good many of you would agree with.