Tim likes to say he ran away from home to join the circus, but the truth is his mother was happy to give him a push out the door. Tim went from being a wiseacre in high school to being one of many wiseacres in Clown College, a circus arts school run by Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey Circus. There, he learned clown comedy and makeup; skills like juggling, unicycling and acrobatics; and, not least of all, how to take a pie in the face. He then traveled around the U.S. performing as a clown with Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey Circus.
When Tim began to question whether he had a sufficient funny bone, he left the circus for college at UC Santa Barbara and then law school at UC Berkeley. He spent 35 years as an appellate lawyer. During that time, he taught appellate law at UC Davis Law School for a decade and also worked first as a staff attorney and then as the managing attorney of the California Court of Appeal, Third Appellate District, in Sacramento.
All along, Tim wrote fiction, but waited until his retirement to publish his debut novel, The Wool Translator, released in July 2022. Tim’s forthcoming novel, The Circus of the Vanishing Elephant, is based loosely on his time spent in the circus.
Tim has also written two legal thrillers, which he hopes to publish one day. And he’s hard at work on a sequel to his historical fiction novel, tentatively titled The Sultan’s Translator.
Tim and his wife live in Northern California. They have two adult sons.