Dan was born in Philadelphia in 1957 to a mostly blue-collar, hard-working Irish family. His father was the first person on either side of the family to earn a college degree. Took him 9 years, working during the day, going to college at night, using the GI Bill. In the mid-60s, GE hired his dad as an engineer for the Apollo space program. Dan’s family packed up and moved to Florida, which is where Dan spent most of his childhood.
Dan’s primary interests through high school were basketball and surfing. His family attended church every Sunday, but it wasn’t until his senior year that Dan made a personal decision to become a Christian. In the spring of that same year, he met Cindi, the woman who would become his wife. They were married in 1976. Today, they have 2 grown children, both married, and 5 grandchildren.
A Call To Ministry
During a personal retreat in 1977, Dan experienced a call to pastoral ministry. He began studying and preparing for the next 8 years. In 1985, he was ordained a pastor and served in the same church for the next 25 years. In August 2010, after 3 of his novels were published by a major publishing house (Revell – Baker Publishing Group), Dan retired from pastoral ministry to write full time.
Dan's Journey As An Author
Dan’s novels have received popular and critical acclaim, getting rave reviews from USA Today and magazines like Publisher’s Weekly, Library Journal, BookList and RT Book Reviews. His very first, The Unfinished Gift, won 2 ACFW Carol Awards. It’s still in print 15 years later and has sold over 95,000 copies. Several of his 25-plus other books have won numerous awards and appeared on several national bestseller lists. Over 1.8 million of them are in print or have been downloaded.
His first 13 were under contract with traditional publishers (Revell and Guideposts). At the end of 2014, seeing that the majority of his readers were buying books online, Dan began to publish his novels “as an indie.” His 14th novel (the first to be published independently), is When Night Comes. It released in 2014 as Book 1 in the Jack Turner Suspense Series. Book 2, Remembering Dresden, released the following May. Since then, he’s added 2 more books to the series (Unintended Consequences and Perilous Treasure). Combined they’ve received over 9,000 Amazon Reviews (avg 4.6 Stars). His newest suspense novel, Treacherous Waters, is Book 4 of a “Sequel Series” with Detective Joe Boyd (a popular character in the Jack Turner books) taking the lead role.
As an indie author, Dan now has the freedom to write both inspirational and suspense novels. Book 1 of his first indie inspirational series, Rescuing Finley, released in November 2015. Since then he has released 3 additional books to the series. All of them feature a shelter dog as a main character and also include a love story element. The books have been a smashing success with readers (even those who aren’t dog-lovers). Rescuing Finley has received over 5,000 Amazon reviews. Combined the 4 books have over 13,400 reviews (Avg 4.8 Stars).
In addition to his writing, Dan also enjoys public speaking and is frequently invited to speak at writer’s conferences, either as a keynote speaker or teaching workshops and seminars on a variety of writing topics.
From Books, to Features
The rights to his novel The Reunion were optioned and adapted into a screenplay by a 2-time-Oscar-winning screenwriter and producer. The Reunion movie project is now in pre-production. Dan has co-written the screenplay for his award-winning Christmas novel, The Unfinished Gift, with his son, Isaac, who is now writing and directing movies himself. They are hoping to get this screenplay into production sometime this year. The plan going forward is, to continue adapting more of Dan's novels into movies.
