Having been a professional artist all my life, I am not sure what a writer is supposed to be. Most definitely a creative soul, which can apply to most any form, artist, writer, actor, singer, musician, storyteller and such. Being a writer was in the back of my mind ever since high school. It was just that I had an overwhelming drive to be an artist starting out. My junior high library was well stocked with all kinds of books, Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, the A B C’s of Science Fiction. The U.S. space program was at full speed heading towards the moon. And of course there was Star Trek, a few days before my 15 birthday, on TV, in my living room. Was it any wonder that I would choose SF as my art and writing inspiration? A painting of a Gemini space walk in my college art portfolio even landed me my first job after college at a planetarium in Salt Lake.

Those galactic empires that I read about in those SF books and explorations in Star Trek stayed with me as I conjured up my own ideas about alien civilizations and what would happen if we became part of that. Written ideas, small sketches, a page or two of an outline kept my brain engaged with the possibility of a larger story someday. Someday. Most creative people I know have talked about writing a novel. And, I can understand the daunting challenge of doing that. With wife, children, relatives, job, house, car, lawn, laundry, cooking and all the other distractions of living a regular life, how do you write if it is not actually part of your daily work? Well, you can’t, if you’re not willing to give up much of what you do normally every day.

As an older person with many of the problems of every day living behind me, I found time to write and began to produce a coherent timeline of stories that actually had a plot, direction, characters and a beginning and an end. As with most writers, I was writing the story for myself. But, I got to a point where I wondered if my story would be of interest to someone else. I know that I will never make much, if any money at it, (much like all these cartoon books I have done in the past). Still, I aspire to that exulted level of being a writer, one who has actually written and published a novel. So now, I have accomplished my secondary choice of lifelong desires and plans. I have become a writer.

(Not content to stop at one, I have actually written 3 complete novels and 2 more nearly completed ones. The story continues and hopefully I will get to the end of them, I really want to know how they turn out. Below, my first two completed novels, one out now and the second one this fall.)