Indie Sci Fi

Writers might just be the most boring people on Earth to read about. Yet we’re constantly being asked “just to say a few words about yourself.” Go figure.

Well, here you go: I was born in 1952. I have no excuse for that, sorry. As a boy I was fascinated by baseball and space travel. Unfortunately, my career opportunities were limited in both fields, so I took up mathematics and physics, and eventually became a real-time software engineer. That’s how I’ve made my living lo! these many moons.

However, being a wordy sort, I was moved to write, as well; no one I knew was willing to listen to me long enough to hear even the shortest of the stories floating through my head. So, at the tender age of sixteen, I blew my lawn-mowing money on a manual typewriter and, it being 1968, discovered the joys of carbon paper and correction tape. Nothing came of those early efforts, and after a couple of years’ fruitless struggles to interest the pulps in my adolescent narratives, I gave up the whole idea for a long time.

Fast-forward to 1994. Desperate for something to deflect the angst of incipient middle age, I returned to writing, this time with a computer and a word processor. I’d become fascinated with a character idea: a young woman of great beauty, intelligence, and physical potential who’s been taken captive by a vicious biker gang, cannot remember her life before her capture, and must ultimately commit a murder to win her freedom. Her story, and the story of her exceedingly unlikely rescuer and mentor, became On Broken Wings, my first novel, which was completed in 1997.

There have been many ups and downs since then. Conventional publishing houses have proved impervious to my semi-gothic supernatural fantasies, my science-fiction-for-readers-who-detest-science-fiction, and so forth. With the rise of electronic publishing and print-on-demand, my books are beginning to find a readership at long last.

Apart from that: I enjoy a modest existence on the eastern end of Long Island in a creaky old ranch house, overfilled with books, that perpetually threatens to collapse on my head. I have one dog — Rufus the Newfus — five cats — Electra, Orestes, April Come She Will, Irving Seymour Creamsicle, and Uriel the Great — and a wife of surpassing patience who claims still to love me, after twenty years and against all the odds. My personal vices are action movies, NHL hockey, Harvey’s Bristol Cream Sherry, the music of Glass Hammer, the military fantasies of Glen Cook, the Vladimir Taltos adventures of Steven Brust, and the SF romances of Linnea Sinclair. My chiefest ambitions are to complete Liberty’s Torch (the sequel to Which Art In Hope), Powers Of The Air (a near-future Christian / SF novel), At The Gates Of The City (a political thriller), and The Warm Lands (my long-neglected fantasy novel) before dementia overtakes me, and never again to set foot on an airliner.

All my best,

Fran