Russ has been writing books for years as a hobby. Within the past 20 years he decided to start publishing them on his own. His books are not always politically correct nor are they written to cater to the tastes of the general reading public. Consequently, the commercially-oriented channels of the larger publishing houses were not an option. He chose to self-publish with Lulu. His characters are sometimes loosely based on people he has encountered in real life, and sometimes they meet him in his own imagination, but they are always interesting and surprising, especially to him. He has discovered that stories take on lives of their own, and they rarely end up the way you think - even when you're writing them.