Introduction

Hello. 

This is my authors web page, where I will talk about the books, stories, and essays I write and hopefully get feedback from readers and anyone interested in the topics that come up.

I haven’t kept the  “Rocks and (no) Roads” blog up to date, but I hope to remedy that in the future. This is a blog about geology and off-roading, although sometimes it doesn’t discuss hard-core four-wheeling but only trips along highways with a focus on the geology.

I am also including a blog for “Reading Monkeys.” This is the name I use for publishing novels. I’m also on Facebook and Twitter.

About me.

I haven’t always been a writer. I can’t claim to be a good one either, although I am very thorough and I hope my books are imaginative and fun to read. I started writing after I retired from the Naval Research Laboratory, where I conducted oceanographic research for twenty years. My writing career began when I finally had time to think about something other than my research and raising my two children, who are about to graduate from college. I may add a page about my research later, but I don’t think anyone would find it very interesting. Not even me.

Writing fiction started with my pet peeve about aliens visiting earth and doing all kinds of things, like creating humans, flying around for no apparent purpose other than mutilating cattle and sexually assaulting people, etc. I was going to write a short story with a much simpler narrative for unexplained phenomena which, as a scientist, I do accept as inevitable in a universe we are only beginning to understand. We just don’t have to invoke gods and aliens to explain the unknown; however, I did turn to metaphysics in the four books that grew out of the original short story idea. It is science fiction, after all.

I’m also interested in conspiracies, although I am very skeptical of complex explanations of events that are easily understood as a calamity of errors. I’ve written about one conspiracy I think is very reasonable. I guess you could say that I don’t have a favorite genre to write about; however, I can’t write poetry and I cannot imagine writing like F. Scott Fitzgerald, several of whose stories I’m currently reading. We’re all safe from that calamity.