Write here…
Ehen

Like many science-fiction writers, I grew up watching SF TV shows. Weekends at 5:00pm I would plant myself in front of our family television set and watch reruns of Star Trek. I anticipated eagerly all the brilliant new science-fiction television programming that never seemed to come. As I got older, thankfully, science-fiction content trickled into my television and onto my local movie screens - and then exploded when Star Wars: A New Hope first took the world by storm. (Of course, back then, it was just Star Wars!)

SF television showed me the way to the great SF writers that I could find at the library or bookstore. I still remember the first time I pulled down the little green hardcover of Anne McCaffrey's The Dragonriders of Pern and lost myself in the amazing fictional world that McCaffrey built. As a pre-teen and a teenager, I devoured the SF content from our local library and bookstores. I would stretch out in my bedroom, nose deep in a book, while outside the crack of an aluminum baseball bat would ring out. While I read (or wrote BASIC programs on my first computer) the neighborhood kids my age would play three-flies up.

I knew that I wanted to write from an early age. I'd written my first official SF short story back in the third grade. It was about monsters that jumped out of a classroom filmstrip projector. A bit derivative. But hey. I was eight.

Years later I graduated California State University, Northridge with a degree in Film Screenwriting. Degree in hand ... I did not go work in the film industry; my first job was in television and to do this day I continue to work as a post-production TV producer.

However, I never lost touch with my love of reading and writing. Shortly after graduating college, I dove deep into a personal creative writing education course. I read postmodern writers such as John Barth, magical realism writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 19th century writers such as Honore de Balzac, and of course, science-fiction. All the SF I could get my hands on (Asimov, Clarke, Vonnegut, Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, Philip K. Dick ... and one of my biggest influences, Clifford D. Simak.)

And I wrote. I wrote, wrote, and wrote. I've written enough unpublished content to fill a dozen large plastic bins, some which I've kept, and some of which I've pulped. Unfortunately, these earlier works were a big, fat jumble of mostly nonsense.

I am grateful and thrilled to have completed first self-published novel, They All Lived In Castles. I wrote it over a period of four years. I wrote on weekends and mornings and in between television gigs. I fought through a zillion rewrites and lost my way and then found my way more than once. I learned a lot while writing this novel - that's for sure!

I live in Los Angeles with my lovely family: my wife, two children, dog and cat. I continue to work as a post-production television producer in reality TV as well as writing my second SF novel. Sometimes my cat actually allows me to write. Sometimes not.

And so it goes.