James Daniel Beers was born with a huge head in Idaho in 1976 (a bicentennial baby!). His father - Daniel James Beers - worked for the Idaho Fish & Game and transferred the family around the state until finally settling at the fish hatchery in the tiny Idaho Panhandle town of Clark Fork when James was nine-years-old. While there in the thick wet forests surrounding the family's home James fell in love with the outdoors and one of his favorite authors, Patrick F. McManus. From when he was 9 until he left home at 18, James camped, hunted, hiked, rafted, and otherwise adventured through "The Woods" with mishap and mayhem, creating the stories that he now writes for others to enjoy.

In 1995 James went to college fully intent on becoming a writer - a dream of his since writing Run-Away-Bear when he was eight-years-old. But by the time he was a junior in college, his professors had convinced him that creative writing was so hard as to be nearly impossible and that archaeology was only slightly less difficult. So nowadays, during daylight hours, James sits at a desk and writes technical papers about ancient peoples' trash (aka, archaeology). He says it's not always as bad as it sounds. In the evenings he devotes some of his always-limited time to putting stories to paper. His first published story was "Sleddin' Road."