Doug Lane was born in upstate New York. He was told he cried when he got home from his first day of kindergarten because he didn't learn to read at a higher level. He was probably just hangry.
Armed with a library card from his grandmother, he cut his teeth on the works of Ray Bradbury and other writers on the SF shelf at the Carnegie library in his hometown. The Twilight Zone taught him who Charles Beaumont was, and Star Trek and The Outer Limits introduced him to Harlan Ellison. The fiction from this trio of writers instilled in him a desire to be a storyteller.
His first-ever published piece of fiction was in his high school newspaper in 1980. Good luck finding a copy of that bit of juvenilia. He sold his first piece of professional fiction in 2006. In between, he was a reporter for two local newspapers, managed defense contract deliverables for a government contractor, briefly worked in distillate sales for a major oil company, managed quality assurance for a telephone billing company, and was a marketing writer and project manager for a GPS tracking software company.
He took a decade off to renovate a house and sell a bunch of other stories, build a website, and make ice cream. He excels in at least one of these areas. Try the toasted cocoanut.
He earned a degree in English from the State University of New York in Binghamton. Eighteen years after the fact, he returned to school and received a masters in Journalism from Georgetown University. He’s mulling a doctorate in Library Science, but it feels like padding the resume.
He changed his byline from his full name to Doug Lane because, frankly, he got tired of having to decide if he needed a period after the ‘J’ or not.
He makes his home in Aloha, OR with his wife and their feline overlord. Everyone knows who’s calling the shots.