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Throughout my life I\u2019ve held a wide variety of jobs: grocery sacker, your basic burger-flipper, limo driver, tele-researcher (if I disturbed your dinner during the month of August, 1990, I deeply apologize), photographer, and writer. Happily, I\u2019ve managed to make a career out of the last one.<\/p>\n
However, before writing professionally (I\u2019ve written most of my life just no one thought to pay me for it), I joined the entertainment industry by becoming a special effects<\/a> assistant working<\/a> on commercials, movies, and television shows. My friend and roommate at the time, Bob Trevino<\/a>, was just beginning his career in special effects and often brought me along when they needed an extra pair of hands. Well, making fire, rain, and generally blowing stuff up turned out to be quite a fun job, if you can imagine. It didn\u2019t hurt that people in the film community are some of the best people in the world.<\/p>\n Later I was given the opportunity to work in the prop <\/a>department on a new PBS<\/em> show called Wishbone<\/a><\/em>. While working the first season, I wrote a couple of spec scripts<\/a> for the show and when the second season rolled around, I was asked to co-write an episode. I later became a staff writer and even co-wrote Showtime\u2019s feature-length movie, Wishbone\u2019s Dog Days of the West<\/em><\/a> (Here I am playing a small role in the Wishbone episode I co-wrote: War of the Noses<\/em>–photo by Carol Kaelson<\/a>). Near the end of the series, I met the editor of the Wishbone<\/em> books, Kevin Ryan<\/a>. A talented writer himself, Kevin gave me the opportunity to write four Wishbone<\/em> novels and taught me many things about writing books for young readers. It\u2019s not always easy to keep things straight when the main character in your book is a dog who imagines himself to be heroes from classic literature. In fact, if you\u2019re a fan of the show, I recommend picking up any of the books in the series (not just mine). Kevin did a great job editing and pulling together a host of talented authors to tackle the job.<\/p>\n I later joined the corporate side of the entertainment industry for a couple of years by becoming the Creative Development Director for Lyrick Studios (now Hit Entertainment<\/a>) where I helped create new brands, television series, and book series. I consulted on the company\u2019s existing brands and many of their individual marketing strategies, giving me valuable experience of how major brands are created, marketed, and maintained.<\/p>\n The corporate life wasn\u2019t for me and I went back to freelance writing and the short commute of simply walking upstairs to my study. I\u2019ve been at it now for the past twenty years where I continue to write for advertising<\/a>, publishing<\/a>, series television, and video<\/a>.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve written twenty-five episodes for the PBS<\/em> series, Barney & Friends<\/em><\/a>, as well as written on nine of Barney’s home videos. I’ve also written five home videos for the preschool property, BOZ, the Green Bear Next Door<\/em><\/a>. I continue to write for kids of all ages by authoring more than one hundred books<\/a> to date. They vary from junior novelizations and chapter books to early readers and preschool books. For older kids and grown-ups, I just finished co-writing the script for my very first video game: Wilson’s Heart<\/a>.<\/p>\n Member of the National Eagle Scout Association<\/a>, the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators<\/a>, and The International Association of Media Tie-in Writers<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Throughout my life I\u2019ve held a wide variety of jobs: grocery sacker, your basic burger-flipper, limo driver, tele-researcher (if I disturbed your dinner during the month of August, 1990, I deeply apologize), photographer, and writer. Happily, I\u2019ve managed to make a career out of the last one. However, before writing professionally (I\u2019ve written most of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":2,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelanthonysteele.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/98"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelanthonysteele.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelanthonysteele.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelanthonysteele.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelanthonysteele.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=98"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/michaelanthonysteele.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/98\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5326,"href":"http:\/\/michaelanthonysteele.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/98\/revisions\/5326"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelanthonysteele.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelanthonysteele.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=98"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/michaelanthonysteele.com\/about\/ondaset.jpg\")
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On a MORE personal note, I go by Anthony or Ant (short for Anthony and not because I can lift twenty times my own weight). I enjoy photography, hiking, kayaking, camping, scuba diving, and writing music. I live on a ranch in Texas with my researcher\/editor\/wife\/best friend, Becky along with our three dogs, five cats, and three donkeys.<\/p>\n