I grew up an Army brat. My father was a Chaplain in the US Army, and served in Europe during WWII. I’ve lived in Japan and Germany as well as on several Army posts in the US. I graduated from Killeen High School (which is right next door to Fort Hood, Texas) and attended Trinity University in San Antonio (BA, 1963). I did graduate work at Tulane University, but moved to Baylor College of Medicine in Houston from where I got my PhD degree in virology in 1971. I’ve worked not only at Baylor, but also at Methodist Hospital in Houston, at Duke University in Durham, NC, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Cincinnati, and most recently a short stint at Clean Earth Technologies in Winston-Salem, NC.
I’ve done a little of a lot of things, mostly in different fields in virology*: AIDS, environmental, cancer, clinical. Within those fields I had to work with a lot of different viruses, including HIV, herpes simplex (and others in the herpesvirus group), poliovirus and other enteroviruses, reovirus, rotavirus, hepatitis viruses (there are several), influenza virus, and probably a few I don’t remember. I’ve even done a little bioterrorism research. (I’m not supposed to give any details. It’s all hush-hush, you know.) Right now, though, I’ve given up research to concentrate on writing science fiction stories. I’ve finished a sci-fi novel and its sequel (which constitute the first two books of a trilogy) and scratched out a few short stories. The third book in the trilogy is currently in the long tedious stage of revision. That will take a while. If you’ve ever done any writing, you’ll know what I mean. Writing is revising, isn’t it?
I used to have a few hobbies: woodworking, photography, model railroading, music, but all those have been set aside to one degree or another while I sit in front of a computer all day and type words onto a screen. Like now.
I’ve always been a reader. Mostly scientific stuff as you can imagine, but I’ve read a fair number of novels, especially recently, now that I don’t have to concentrate on all that scientific folderol. I wrote a few scientific papers during my tenure as a researcher, but I’m not listing them here. If anyone’s really interested in looking at them, I’ll send them a list.
Given all that, why, in 2010, did I decide to start writing a blog? What’s behind this form of writing? It comes down to three basic reasons: (1) Writing a blog on a semi-regular basis forces me to put my thoughts down in some reasonably coherent order. It also obliges me to think in substantial detail about my opinions and beliefs concerning writing and science, and to think them through to their logical conclusion. I’m not just blurting out a half-baked opinion as I might do in informal conversation, I have to think extensively on the subject well before I begin to write. It’s been surprising how, after thinking in detail about a subject and laying out the blog post, my opinion on the subject has changed. Not to a great extent in all cases, mind you, but subtly. Writing a blog post can actually modify and solidify my opinion when I realize how unrealistic it was in the beginning.
(2) A blog is a repository for my ideas and thoughts. It’s a place to keep them and I can pull them down and look at them later. I can go back and see what I wrote on a given subject any time I want.
(3) A blog allows anyone who wants or is so inclined to read and comment. Perhaps one or more blog posts will stimulate some conversation and change a mind or two. I’m not holding my breath, but it is fun to speculate.
And so, now that blog has turned into a real website. What’s behind that? Now I have written a trilogy of science-fiction books which are in the process of being published, and I’m announcing them here. I expect that the books will NOT be available on Amazon, I’m looking only to sell them through bookstores. Why? I’ve decided I want to promote, as far as I can in my own small way, the continued existence of the independent, physical, brick-and-mortar bookstore, whether as a member of a national chain at a large shopping mall (such as Barnes and Noble), or the small, independent bookstore on the corner, or nestled cozily in a small strip mall somewhere. I believe in the bookstore. Rather than try and peruse books on a computer screen where you can’t handle the book and open it and check out the various aspects of the book such as the size, cover, type of font, readability, preliminary stuff, first page, page 99 (or whatever page you want), the last page, the dedication page, the acknowledgement page, and all the other stuff that make up a real live book (as opposed to a com screen), I have always preferred to visit a bookstore and look at the merchandise directly. You gain so much more info about whether you want to buy the book that way. I have, admittedly, bought many a book on the spot because I liked something about it, if only the first line. I strongly encourage you to visit a bookstore. Hopefully, there’s one not far from where you live.
But at the bottom of all my effort there still remains the main question: why writing? Why did I give up research—which is the essence of an activity that is intensely objective—to write stories which are exasperatingly subjective? That’s a good question, one I’ve asked myself many, many times in the past fifteen years or so. For a long time, I couldn’t answer it. I usually mumbled something about “it’s something I have to do,” or “I can’t not write,” or “I started and can’t stop.” Those are all true, without a doubt, but have never been completely satisfactory. Only during the calendar year 2015 did I solidify my feelings on the matter and set up another page on my blog (and carried over to this website) which I called From Science To Fiction. Click on it and you’ll get an eyeful.
Finally, before I end this mini-biography and opinion piece, I want to extend my sincere thanks and grateful appreciation to Jamii Corley of Southwest Cyberport here in Albuquerque for the substantial help she gave me in the construction of this website. Quite literally, I couldn’t have set it up without her.
*If you’re confused about viruses, and what they are, just remember this: protozoa are small, and bacteria are even smaller, but viruses are smaller than both of them put together. (I don’t know who the first person was to say this; it wasn’t me.) My definition of a virologist is this: a virologist is a person who washes his hands before he goes to the bathroom.