Early Career
Mack attended New York University's Tisch School of the Arts as an undergraduate, from 1987 to 1991. There he majored in film and television production and screenwriting.
After receiving several rejections on early spec-script submissions to Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Mack teamed up with John J. Ordover, then an editor in Pocket Books' Star Trek Department. Working together, the pair combined Ordover's ability to arrange pitch meetings with the shows' producers with Mack's training in screenwriting.
In 1995, the pair made their first story sale, to Star Trek: Voyager, though the project was never produced. A few weeks later they made another sale, this time to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, for the fourth-season episode "Starship Down". Another story pitched by the pair during that same meeting was bought three years later, as the basis for the seventh-season episode "It's Only a Paper Moon", for which the pair received a "story by" credit.
During the 1990s, Mack performed freelance editorial work for Pocket Books. His duties ranged from reading slush manuscripts and writing rejection letters to drafting reference materials for established authors and series, such as Peter David's Star Trek: New Frontier books. That work led to Mack being invited to draft a 5,000-word supplement for John Vornholt's novel The Genesis Wave, Book One, which in turn earned Mack an invitation in 2000 to write his own first full-length Star Trek book.
Mack and Ordover wrote the four-part Deep Space Nine/Next Generation comic book miniseries Divided We Fall for WildStorm. With Keith R.A. DeCandido, Mack co-wrote the two-part Starfleet Corps of Engineers (SCE) e-book story Invincible.
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