My first home in Deadwood, South Dakota with my budding artist mother and musician father, where I slept in the store room of my grandfather’s business.

My mom gave our first dog a French name, Desirée. We called her Dizzy. I love dogs and have had one almost all my life. Today, Shiou-Mei is a Wheaten terrier, fifteen years young.

I write my first short story at age 15, “The Red Eye,” published in the Rapid City High School literary chapbook, Paha Sapa Sketches. It wasn’t the first story I wrote, but it was better by at least a car length).

My short story, “Three to Get Ready,” wins third place in the United States Air Forces in Europe (USAFE) Short Story Contest.

I self-publish a handmade book of poetry, New Work 1971, run off on our college mimeograph machine in purple ink.

I finish my Master’s degree in Comparative Literature coursework at Sonoma State College (California) and begin writing my magnum opus thesis, “Transfiguration and the Feminine Principle in D. H. Lawrence, Andre Gide and Thomas Mann,” which I don’t finish until 1982.

I begin my career in college textbook publishing at Wadsworth Publishing Co., atop a hill in Belmont, California. It was a lot like working at the Eagles’ Hotel California.

Moved to Boston to become an editor at Allyn & Bacon, where I miss the Blizzard of 1978 but am just in time for the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown, which I survive.

Hired as Senior Editor, Special Projects, at Computerworld newsmagazine. Two years later, I’m fired in an attempted editorial coup d’état led by sales and marketing. In between, I get to interview Thomas J. Watson, Sr., who founded IBM.

A college dream comes true as my first book, The Naked Computer (with John Gantz) is published to rave reviews from New York to Silicon Valley. John and I were often referred to as “The Computer Liberaces.”

My first computer crime private eye short story featuring Ned Marlowe, son of Philip Marlowe, is published in Computer Update magazine, followed by a Dennis Driscoll mystery in 1987.

Computers for People, my first college textbook, is published by Irwin to design awards and praise for innovation.

After moving from Boston to rural New Hampshire I take up outdoor journalism, with an emphasis on cycling.

Traveling to Scotland, I write about mountain biking on the Water of Leith Walkway between Edinburgh and Balerno, which I rode with nary a single face plant.

I begin writing and publishing “Sticks,” a newsletter for people interested in moving to the country.

I publish my first Dennis Driscoll novella, The Secret of Cyberspace Farm.

A short story, “Smoke and Mirrors,” is published in a pioneer online literary ‘zine, New Works Review.

Pirates of the Digital Millennium, My twelfth and last book on technology, once again with John Gantz, is published. The Chinese translation outsells the English version three to one. Here’s what a book looks like while it’s being written.

I begin writing my first literary novel, Wild Blue Yonder. It undergoes seven revisions over four years. By this time self-publishing is catching fire, and I decide to forego the usual agent route and try out the new publishing technology. It comes out in 2011 and sells like crazy on Amazon.

I start releasing new content on my website regularly via two blogs, a book (and sometimes film) review and a place to share my random thoughts and reflections, My Brain on Grape-Nuts.

2019: The long-anticipated Anarchy, third in the Nathaniel Hawthorne Flowers trilogy, finally sees print, along with our very first Fictional Café anthology. And to top it off, I start a major edit of a treasured unpublished manuscript, Bridge Across the Ocean.

2018: In preparation for the third installment of my literary trilogy, I republish the first, Wild Blue Yonder, with new cover art and revisions.

2020: I work with my associate editor to get Bridge Across the Ocean, my upcoming novel, down from over 115,000 to around 85,000 words. We also start working on a collection of my short stories—stay tuned for that!

2014: I publish the second novel in my Nathaniel Hawthorne Flowers literary trilogy, Madrone. It’s set in Santa Cruz, CA, where I wrote most of it.

Part II There are some books you wish would never end (and in fact one reviewer of Bridge Across the Ocean wrote those same words) and some books you just can’t wait until they end. You finish reading them out of respect for the author but keep fanning the remaining pages, wishing they would hurry […]

Something non-deminational everyone can enjoy It’s that day and that time of year, and I won’t say more except to introduce you to two, yet two, audio treats to listen to. They’re totally family-friendly, so everyone can listen. I give thanks to our sister website, Fictional Cafe, and Ruby Fink, the Audio Arts Barista, for […]

How the mystery novel has changed over the past two centuries Wilkie Collins wrote the first American mystery novel, The Woman in White, published in 1859. However, Edgar Allen Poe’s gruesome The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket preceded it by about twenty years. To the mystery reader, they bear interest to see how […]

It’s not about why. It’s not even about how. He didn’t want to catch COVID, quite simply because he didn’t like to get sick. He was a hard worker and illness interrupted his productivity. Not the kind of guy who enjoyed lying in bed binging on Netflix. So he was careful and respected the CDC […]