This always seems like blowing your own horn,

which I really don't like, but many people seem to expect it, sooo...
I was born at a very early age, in fact, I was still a baby. The time? Well it was the dawn of pre-history, February 9, 1937 to be exact. I can remember at the age of 4 years getting very upset because they would not let me go to school. They did not have preschool and kindergarten where I lived back then. Finally, after 427 years (well it seemed that long) the big day arrived and I got to start in the FIRST GRADE!

Reading came natural to me. And by the time that I was in the fourth grade, I discovered the old pulp science fiction magazines that my mother used to buy. I read every one of them, cover to cover. I was hooked and a die hard fan of science fiction and fantasy for life. I can still remember sneaking through the back alleys of an ancient city on Venus with the hero. Later, Ray Bradbury had me trekking the red sands of Mars, then Isaac Asimov had me stalking the steel corridors with R. Daniel Olivar, a humanoid robot. I was much more sophisticated now than I had been in that Venusian city.

I took all of the science, math and English (including literature) that I could during high school. Then because I really could not afford college, I joined the Air Force after high school and received training in electronics. I followed a career in science and technology for most of my adult life. I was fortunate enough to get to work on the Saturn/Apollo missions, and later on the Skylab. This was with General Electric. It was during the Skylab program that I became involved with computers as a maintenance man on the old CDC 160G. That was an old mainframe that was built entirely of discrete components because they did not have integrated circuits back then. It did not take me long to realize that I could not be a good maintenance man if I could not make the computer do what I wanted it to do, so I learned programming. I had to enter my programs as a string of 1's and 0's.

Then I became involved with mini computers, and had higher level programming languages available to me. It did not take GE long to discover that I was as good with the software as I was with the hardware, and I was often given software writing assignments. Some of my software was even sold by GE to the government. I eventually became a systems analyst and it was in that position one day after 23 years with GE that my manager came up to me and told me that GE was having a RIF (Reduction In Force) and that I was on it. Everyone that got RIF-ed at that time had at least 15 years with the company.

I came back home to South Carolina and found a job as a "senior design technician" working for a company that was designing a large scale, computer controlled security system for the government. In time, I became the de facto project engineer

It was during this time that I was talking to my brother one day and he told me that he had seen the old family bible, and that my father's mother, who I had never known, was listed as a Cherokee. That explained a lot of things to me, like why I had always felt drawn to Native American ways and spirituality.

When the project that I was working on wound down, I left that company and went to work for another company doing essentially the same thing. Then the day came when they ran out of work, and had to lay off almost everyone. I spent the next three years having every prospective employer that I applied to tell me that I was "over qualified." For those of you who do not know, that means "too old." But it was during this time that I wrote Tomar and Dwarf Quest. I would work on one of them in the morning and the other in the afternoon. It took me a year to write the two of them. Then I got bored because I had finished both books and started writing Exiled to Magic Another 6 months there.

Although I am working on some other stories, my other work does not give me as much time as I would like to devote to writing. So that is pretty much for my bio as pertains to my writing. I hope that you have not been too bored.