Weaverville

Tim W. Jackson's first taste of scuba diving came at the age of six when he sneaked breaths off his dad's double-hose regulator in the deep end of the pool. Later, as an ex-journalist armed with a newly-minted master's degree in English, he discovered he was qualified to be a bartender, a waiter or a PhD student. Instead he chose Secret Option D: run off to the Cayman Islands to work as a scuba instructor and boat captain by day and write fiction at night. Two decades later, he still wishes that was half as interesting as it sounds. Or even a quarter . . . Jackson is the award-winning author of the comic Caribbean novels Blacktip Island and The Secret of Rosalita Flats, as well as The Blacktip Times humor blog. His "Tales from Blacktip Island" short stories have been published in literary journals worldwide. He is currently concocting his next Blacktip Island novel and still enjoys scuba diving with his dad's old double-hose reg.