A website page about oneself is an opportunity to write your own obituary.
Here I have achieved my (erp) fifties and want to convey something witty and catchy as an introduction to those who stop by.
Perhaps one of the defining things of this life of mine, since this is a website, is that in the mid seventies is when I learned to program BASIC at high school. I was involved in personal computers from the beginning. I was in the electronics lab when the Altair kit was released and one of my fellow students built one.
I had an Apple II+ by 1981 and wrote my History Thesis on it for UCLA. In those days we were limited to 70 characters on the screen via a card that you bought from Microsoft for about $150 that gave you an extra 16k of memory.
When the Mac was released (remember that iconic commercial during the Superbowl?
)
I was with a friend who was asking my opinion about what computer to get for his son. I directed him to get it for his son and he pulled out $2600 in cash to buy the original 128K Mac. Exciting times.
From that Apple II+, I have had a Mac+, Classic Mac, Quadro, PC, 3 PC Laptops and am now back computing on an iMac, with an iPhone and iPad as well. (Personal computers, work is a whole other story starting with the original 8088 IBM PC.)
As a writer I have had a different journey.
I have long liked to think up stories, and then, I started to write them down. I let the process of learning the craft of writing ferment over twenty years. Many writing courses at university, many drafts, many writers groups, many rejection letters until finally I got into the zone. It all began to click. The story was good, the craft was good, the work was ready.
My delving into history (one long and giant story, after all), which I have a degree in from UCLA, was enhanced with my joining the reenactment community. First I delved into the Medieval period, and then the Renaissance. I spent time with Restoration, and then Georgian and Regency. And also delved into the Victorian. Though I list these linearly, my exploration was not always straightforward.
While doing this, I became an expert at teaching the dance of many of these times periods and have instructed thousands in the premodern forms of dance. I often try to place a dance in my novels. It was at such a dance, for the English Regency period that I met my wife. And as one sees in my body of work, the Regency has been where lately I have been most prolific.