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Jeff has done a lot of things on the road to becoming a writer. For a long time he called professional kitchens home. He landed in the kitchen when he realized corporate life was not for him. It was a place that satisfied his need to make things and desire to dive deep into technique and art. The two big questions from this time in his life are:

• What is your favorite thing to cook? Stock, it only makes sense to another proper villain.
• What is your favorite thing to eat? Anything anyone else cooks, seriously, when you log as many hours in the kitchen as he has, the gift of some one else feeding you with something they have made is nearly impossible to beat.

Somewhere along the line he discovered that kitchen work doesn’t pay so well. At the best paying kitchen job he ever had he was paying to work. So he recalibrated and became a stay at home dad. It gave him more time to spend with his kids, who he rarely saw, because cook hours are the same as the hours children are awake and not at school.

It gave him time to be the kind of dad he wanted to be, and fortunately kitchen skills are portable. He did a number of things while he was a SAHD, taught cooking classes, catered some small events, even helped people organize their kitchens (he has suggestions). Somewhere in the twenty-teens he ran afoul of NaNoWriMo, (aka National Novel Writing Month, RIP) and tried his hand a writing his first novel. It still lives as a digital document and may one day find its way into the world.

In 2017 he released Desecration, the first book in his Dead Line series. He followed a couple years later with Homestead, Dead Line, Book 2.

Then we all stayed home for a while. It’s fun to make 15 meals a day, every day, for more than a year, or rather, that’s what he told himself. In the aftermath of staying home for a really long time, the family made a move from Miami, Florida to Boston, Massachusetts. Now all the children were at least in high school. Jeff had enjoyed writing at least as much as cooking, so he started writing again. His wife says he thinks with his hands.

There is truth to that statement. He likes building things, making things, and creating things. He designs and builds sets for a local high school. He is dragging his local friends into woodworking and the current project is a chair. The shelf next to his desk has a collection of carving knives and axes, which he uses to turn found wood into spoons and other kitchen wooden ware. Lately he is adding music to the things he does with his hands and a couple guitars hang on the wall behind him as he writes.

It’s hard not to notice all of these things revolve around the space where he writes. Stories start as ideas, characters, and sometimes beautiful disasters. His list of stories to write has grown into the dozens, and for every one that gets written he adds at least a dozen more. These days he gets up early, because even a night owl can change when he spends twenty odd years getting kids to school on time. He has breakfast. He writes.

Hobbies: Woodworking, Theater, Cooking, Guitar, Sharpening Things

Family: Jeff is married to his wife of twenty-eight years. They have three children and a dog.

Contact: JeffOberg@j3epress.com
@knifetales on Instagram and Threads