It all started in 1979, when I was born. Okay, so the first 18 years of that story are pretty boring. Fast forward then to 1998 when I got my first job that wasn’t food related wage slavery. Okay, so I learned a lot of stuff from those jobs: how to change a trash liner, how to clean up after myself, how to make a damned good sandwich and creative ways to smoke oregano out of a bell pepper. Anyway, 1998 was the year I got my dream job working in computers and software and, even though I’ve regretted it ever since, I’ve learned a few things. Number one: I hate computers. I’m pretty good with them and all that, but fifteen years of answering tech support calls from sleazy, grumpy and dopey telemarketers kinda takes the fun out of anything. When I finally got out of the call center industry and discovered “the cloud”, things started looking up. I was building really cool stuff and my call center telephony experience gave me a pretty niche set of skills that offset my lack of about everything else. You see, I’ve only ever really had one skill: the capacity and the tenacity to figure out damned near anything. And I liked to write. I honed my writing skills on crafting emails and documentation that distilled technical concepts and procedures into simple instructions for morons. Most of these included some off-beat, often inappropriate but, I think, damned funny humor and it kept me from drinking turpentine to pass the time.
I like fucking with things. It’s how I got to where I am today. I dropped out of high school twice and got my GED when I was 19. I spent more time in community college than I should have only to come out of it without a degree or a diploma other than my applied kinesthesiology certification from a class where you got to ask college girls, “may I touch you,” without getting slapped. I’m also a certified phone system installer. Like the GED, neither of those has come in handy. Bottom line is, I’m an autodidact, which means I learn just enough about everything to get me into trouble, and, coupled with an unearned sense of confidence, people pay me to be an expert. Ain’t the world grand? But with all that self education in life, the universe and everything, I like to create worlds and write scenarios into science fiction novels. Space opera, cyberpunk, post-apocalyptic squirrel fantasy, whatever lets me explore all these ideas is what I like to write.
This might sound like a tired cliche, but I’ve never given two hoots about what anybody thinks of me. Well, that’s not true. There’s a tiny selection of people I actually care about and most of them popped out of my wife’s vagina. Their opinion matters, yours probably doesn’t. That might sound like a piss-poor attitude for someone hoping to gain a following of readers, but I can’t help it. I’m probably on the spectrum, somewhere deep in the ultraviolet where I can definitely read social cues, but I just don’t care and use them mostly to avoid uncomfortable interactions. Hey, as a friend of mine likes to say, “I’ve been me a long time.” So I can’t promise I will ever be couth, friendly, proper, well mannered, or discrete, but I do often try to be kind. This also means that I don’t take myself too seriously and am not offended by negative feedback. Unfair or abusive feedback might piss me off, but if you think something I wrote or did or said is bad, dumb, stupid, or unkind, then, by all means, troll me in the comments. I might not ignore you.
I’m a family man with a lot of kids and kids are expensive, so I work a lot. I’m trying to make it rich in writing and figure it’s a better strategy than winning the lottery. My family runs the gamut of neurodiversity and disorders, but every damned one of them is brilliant. So I have to be brillianter than I am in order to show them how brilliant they can be and to afford all the crap they want to do. At one time, I was writing to be an author of prestige, now I’m writing for them and the stories I am going to tell extend from my experience as a father raising six kids on the cusp of the singularity where their future is uncertain and their struggles are and will be worse than mine ever were. Not everything I write will appear on this site, because it’ll be pseudonymous and geared towards the kinds of stories kids these days need for the world ahead.
The pilot cut the engine on the airboat and the flat bottomed craft slowed and then drifted in the dark.
MewMew and Flick scurried across the golden field under an open sky and for a squirrel an open sky means
