In 1976 Ireland was the happening place for education and I got caught in the current and ended up at Sligo Grammar School. Actually, Sligo wasn't too bad. The food was miserable but then that's what you expect from boarding school, right? Circumstances cut short my stay at Sligo, but instead of returning home I found myself across the border at Gloucester House, the lower prep school for Portora Royal. Even Gloucester House wasn't too bad. On the other hand, Portora was everything you've heard about boarding schools, only worse.

In 1981 I put Portora and Ireland behind me, but once again instead of returning home I found myself at yet another boarding school. This time it was Pierrepont, in the South of England. Now while Portora was brutal and fun was imagined more than real, Pierrepont was more like Animal House in many regards. There was more drinking going on than one might imagine, and it seemed cigarettes were never in short supply. There was also an air of respect. I mean, we'd head down to the Mariner's Pub (across the street) and have a couple of pints, listen to the band and generally have a fair time without being hassled. Then there was also the keg brought in for the school dance. Not too bad at all.

In 1982 I bought my first computer, a TRS80 Model 1, using profits from my black-market business at Portora. Sammy McElroy was the person who inspired me to get into computers and I'm glad he did. Later, I bought a new computer, a Camputers Lynx. I thought I might actually become quite good at it and wrote a game program for it called Starship Orion. Of course by today's standards it sucked (okay, it kinda sucked back then too), but it was a start.

In 1983 it was time to move on. My time at Pierrepont came to a scheduled conclusion, and I was looking forward to getting back to the states, to home, to all I used to know. Of course we had left Alaska in 1977 and moved to Saudi Arabia, but that too came to a conclusion and in September 1983 I arrived in South Carolina, USA. Home never felt so good. South Carolina wasn't exactly what I had in mind but then those are the breaks.

Immediately I studied for the SAT, the requirement I needed for entrance to a US College or University. Actually I was already attending College and took the SAT to ensure I could continue on. Two years later I earned a degree in Engineering Technology and moved to Florida where I enrolled in an engineering program. Two years after that I picked up a second degree, but my hopes of working for NASA blew up January 28, 1986. C'est la vie. I then signed on with an electronics manufacturer and later went on to become a Systems Administrator working with various flavors of Unix. By that time I also had built several home-brew computers that performed a variety of tasks. They were engineering models that I hoped would later revolutionize home control, but I burned out on the design stuff and wasn't getting as interested in the software as I had hoped, so in 1995 I changed directions completely and became a writer.

Today I have nearly completed my first novel. I've actually had several going simultaneously but decided to concentrate on a single story to keep the characters fresh. So far it has worked, but the toughest part has been dealing with the problem of having a simple shoot-em-up space opera take on deeper meaning. Instead of card-board, my characters became real. Each took on different personal traits, and I started to care what they did or said. Weird? Na, it'll be a great book once it's out!