As many of you know, I have an older brother. I want to point out that while he is older, I am bigger.

What I know I don’t need to men­tion is that mom likes me better, because I have always been the more dutiful son. Also, Pete has this Bob Dylan look-alike thing going on, and that’s just hard to get your head around, no matter how you slice it. And you prob­ably are all aware that Peter doesn’t call me nearly as much as he should, and I hon­estly can’t remember the last time he gave me a gift of bacon, much less bacon wrapped any­thing, which is pretty lousy fra­ternal piety if you ask me.  So you may be asking your­self why on earth I put up with him. I ask myself this same ques­tion often, and I think I’ve finally come up with an answer.

I had my heart set on acad­emia from my ear­liest days, and never con­sid­ered the pos­si­bility that I had an artistic bone in my body. If you look at the Prod­ucts page, you’ll note a lot of non-fiction writing early on in my pub­lishing career. This was largely because I believed that the arts wasn’t an arena where I was wel­come or par­tic­u­larly com­pe­tent. Worse, I’d come to believe that the arts wasn’t a serious occu­pa­tion. You couldn’t make a living, and hon­estly, why would you want to? What do artists actu­ally do?

Pete changed that per­spec­tive. He is the most dogged devotee of artistic dis­ci­pline that I have ever known. He treated his music like a trade. He never waited for inspi­ra­tion or bemoaned the fickle muse. Instead, he sweat, honing his music with a focus that put most pro­fes­sionals I know to shame. He refused to run the rat race like the rest of us, eyes wide open regarding the chal­lenges strewn on that path. Music was his job, and it was a worth­while job, and nobody was going to tell him oth­er­wise. Peter played with music, he rev­eled in it, but he always took it incred­ibly seri­ously (“just because some­thing is serious, doesn’t mean it has to be heavy,” he once told me).

Watching him, I began to see pos­si­bil­i­ties in my own nascent fic­tion writing. Maybe this wasn’t just playing around. Maybe this was a thing that could be real, that could be serious, that could be worth the effort and devo­tion that is nec­es­sary to take any­thing to a pro­fes­sional level. He’s my big brother. That means that he’s always right and I am required by law to look up to him. I watched him com­bine his art with raising a won­derful family, with keeping a home, with putting bread on the table and pro­viding health insur­ance. Pete found a way to make his life work in tandem with his art. One didn’t have to be sac­ri­ficed for the other.

Pete taught me to do the same. I am a writer and an officer and a home­owner and all the other reg­ular things that make a life total and suc­cessful largely due to that influ­ence. If not for watching him get up every morning and wade into the cre­ative mael­strom no matter what life threw at him, I don’t think I ever would have believed that writing, let alone fan­tasy writing, could ever be a thing that I could aspire to as an occupation.

The man him­self, on the right. No, it’s actu­ally not Bob Dylan

But, no, it’s absolutely NOT true that he’s better looking than I am, no matter what that chick at Fado’s said. She was drunk. Heck, she was prob­ably drunk and high.

Pete’s musical prowess is on full dis­play with his new act, Lost Leaders. They’re having their release party for their new EP “The Per­fect Lie” on Monday, April 4^th at 8PM at Rock­wood Music Hall at 196 Aleen St. (between Houston and Stanton) in New York City.  You can also down­load their songs, check out a YouTube video and learn more about the band at their web­site.

With a little luck, I might even be able to make that April 4^th party, and I hope to see some of you there. If I’m a writer, it’s in large part because of the guy who’ll be up on that stage.