About

Born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1969, Jason grew up in various locations around the country as a Navy brat. He graduated from Point Loma High School, Point Loma, California, in 1987 and joined the Air Force later that year. He served 21 years in the Air Force as a public affairs specialist. Within that job, he served as a combat correspondent, piloting an F-15 Eagle jet fighter and a sailplane, flying through a hurricane, and traveling to New Orleans to cover the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He also deployed to Baghdad, Iraq and two other undisclosed locations during Operations Iraqi Freedom, Enduring Freedom and Joint Task Force Horn of Africa.

As a teen, Jason watched the original “Star Wars” trilogy more times than he can count, exchanged cassette tapes at Target for money to go to Disneyland every weekend in 1986 and sat through a 72-hour “Robotech” videotape duplicating marathon. He grew up worshiping the guitar chops of Steve Vai, Eddie Van Halen and Joe Satriani while simultaneously kneeling at the illustration chops of Neil Adams, Frank Miller and Dave Sim.

Jason likes James Bond a lot, so he wrote his first book at age 14, called “Lucifer Castaway.” It ran 108 spiral-notebook-bound pages. His second book novel, “The Cerebus Dream” ran considerably longer but served mostly as therapy while he recovered from testicular cancer. Over his military journalism career, Jason wrote or rewrote about 6,000 news, sports and human-interested feature stories of various lengths eventually becoming a Senior Staff Writer for the U.S. Air Force’s flagship magazine, Airman.

Today, Jason lives and works in Germany as a public affairs specialist and the social media lead for the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies. (Disclaimer: the opinions expressed on this blog and on other social media platforms where I may contribute are solely my opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Defense, the US Army or the Marshall Center.) He is three-time first-place recipient of the Department of Defense’s Thomas Jefferson Award. He received another 100-plus awards from the U.S. Air Force and civilian agencies for writing, photography, illustration and more, including awards from the National Association of Government Communicators, the Air Force Association and others.

Jason is a guest blogger for “The Furnace,” primarily talking about comic books, pop culture and other things that fascinate him. He is also a moderator at the Absolute Write Water Cooler and for the reddit.com WritersGroup. Recently, An Army of Ermas also added him as a guest blogger. Jason illustrated three tarot cards for The Zombie Dating Guide and also provided illustrations and a short story for The Undead That Saved Christmas, Vol. 1. In 2000, he co-created a tabletop board game called “Counterterrorist” including writing and designing much of the rulebook and packaging. There are still 847 copies in beautiful boxes if you’d like one.

His current projects include a funny science fiction novel in the spirit of Douglas Adams tentatively titled “Galactic Milk” and a series of comic books based around military special forces with Australian artist Daniel Picciotto. The comic book work with Mr. Picciotto fulfills a lifelong dream of working in the comic book business. He is also working with Mr. Picciotto on concept designs for his own graphic novel set in the future. Also, Jason is the creator and cohost of “The Science Fiction Show,” a weekly look at SciFi in pop culture and elsewhere available via iTunes.

In his spare time, Jason writes music, plays guitar, volunteers at his daughter’s school and plays sports. He has an affinity for snakeskin boots, Luminox watches and German beer. He has taken Kendo & Iaido lessons, and speaks enough German and Portuguese to pass in restaurants. His wife, Denise, tolerates him. His daughter, Annabelle, loves him.

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