I am usually considered a Sci-fi and Fantasy author when anybody tries to categorize me. I learned to write during the 70’s when Tolkien and Michael Moorcock and Frank Herbert were growing bigger, and Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Isaac Asimov were gods. Of course, I also have the YA-thing hanging around my neck like a bell. I learned to tell stories being a dungeon master for middle-school and high-school boys back in the eighties. And because it was Texas with a deeply-held and violently-enforced religious fear of anything with demons in it, I was forced to change my role-playing games from sword and sorcery to science-fiction. I played endless Saturday-afternoon Traveller games that could span parsecs and light-years in a single afternoon. And I was one of those game-masters who used humor to build a campaign and keep the players engaged and interested. We had epic space battles and conquered large swaths of the Orion Spur of the Milky Way Galaxy. When I began turning my Traveller games into fiction, I used the personalities of the boys who played the game with me for characters in the stories. I often used the same plots (applying considerable polish to portions of plot where… well, you know… teenage boys, not remarkably G-rated.) I created things that made me and some of the players laugh, and even feel sad… with deep, cathartic effects, as if we had experienced those things in real life. (The deaths of favorite characters and tragic failures of galaxy-saving plans come quickly to mind.)
I enjoy practically everything Sci-Fi, from Flash Gordon, to Buck Rodgers, to Star Trek and Star Wars… I loved Mechwarrior books and comic-book Sci-Fi like Adam Strange, Hawkworld, and Guardians of the Galaxy (the old ones that came before Groot and Rocket Raccoon). I let it warp and weave my imagination and the imaginary worlds that blossomed from it.
And the ideas continued to morph and change and become stories that I really had to tell.
My first published novel, Aeroquest is a compilation of old Traveller adventures. I published it well before it was ready for market and used a cheap-o publisher that wasn’t worth the free price-tag, They gave me no editorial help and apparently didn’t even read the novel. I will not defame them by name here, but if they sound to you like Publish America… well, there might be a reason.
I love stories about time travel and sci-fi gadgets… trans-mats and starships and meson cannons and sentient plants… oh, my!
And now that I have revealed that I have such a massive nerd-head that I really ought to own Comicon by now, I hope you will not suddenly turn me off and read my blog no more. I can’t help it. I was born that way… and any child doomed to be born in the 50’s and a child in the space-race 60’s was bound to have George-Lucas levels of Sci-Fi nerdism.
Catch a Falling Star 