A Word About Me

I was born in Berkeley and have lived mostly around the San Francisco bay area, though I have spent some time in New York and traveling in Europe. I have a BA from Stanford in creative writing, an MA from Columbia in contemporary literature, and did some further graduate work in English at California Berkeley and Stanford. I’m married; my wife is a psychotherapist in private practice and mentor of therapists.  We’ve three adult children, an ecologist, an engineering manager, and a high school teacher.

I long paid the bills by working as a tech writer: as a staff writer, a manager, and a contractor at places like Apple and Sun. The most interesting work was in the 70’s when I worked for the Augmentation Research Center, the group that developed the basic forms of the mouse, full-screen editing, hypertext, and other things that were visionary at the time. In 1998 I stopped technical writing to devote full time to fiction.

I write short stories, some experimental forms, and occasionally verse, but I think of myself mostly as a novelist, and have written four novels. The first, JANGLE AROUND, is a crime-adventure story involving running drugs from Mexico and including elements of magic realism. The second, THIS MUSIC, is the story of people in their twenties starting, or failing to start, careers as musicians; categorizers would call it main stream. The third, BLIND LIGHT, is set in Greek mythological time and retells the stories of Semele and Dionysos. It is partly based on Euripidies’ play The Bacchae and in a general way it resembles the Mary Renault’s Greek books, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s more serious mythological work, or Evangeline Walton’s THE ISLAND OF THE MIGHTY. The fourth, HOMEMAKING AND WORKING, tells the story of a man who attempts to plan social change based on high technology, a subject I am thoroughly familiar with. It is conventional in general presentation and resembles a biography of the main character, with full attention to how he affects the institutions and people around him. THE LOGIC OF FIRE is about a biker and martial arts expert who is transported to medieval Lithuania. Two of these novels have been serialized in small magazines and widely excerpted. I am currently working on a novel centering on an Indian entrepreneur in Silicon Valley titled THE CEO of Gold Mountain. With some exceptions in shorter pieces, I work from attention to character and development of action from character. I also wrote an essay on the 38 Novels I Often Think of, which you can read on this site.

I published several translations, made with my father, of short stories by the prominent Flemish writer Jos Vandeloo, and in 1985, through a grant from the New York Council for the Arts, Sachem Press published a volume with two of his short novels, THE DANGER and THE ENEMY, which was reviewed favorably in the New York Times and otherwheres. I occasionally publish photography.

I have also published reports and articles about application of computers to text processing and allied subjects and popular articles related to personal computers. Wiley published my book on Mac applications in 1985.

I am a member of the National Writers Union, PEN, and The Authors Guild.