JayG

I've been actively writing fiction for about 40 years and have been offered, and signed, 7 publishing contracts. I have a total of 30 novels available at booksellers at the moment. I've taught writing at workshops, and, owned a manuscript critiquing service before I retired. These days, with more time free, I pay back on the "Benjamin Franklin debt" that those who helped me, and placed such a "pay it forward" debt on me.

    That aside, I'm old, fairly stupid, and I never did set women's hearts aflutter when I came into the room. To make matters worse, I'm a know-it-all. People often dislike me when we first meet, but after a while they usually find themselves thinking, "Hey, I was right. He is a..."
    But first, and before anything else, I'm a storyteller. My skills at writing are subject to opinion, my punctuation has been called interesting at best, but I am a storyteller.
    I'm other things, as well, of course. I am, for example, an electrician. Not quite as good as my father, who taught me the skills, but still, I can usually please those whose homes I've improved.
    I'm an engineer, one who has designed computers and computer systems; one of which during the bad old days of the Cold-War flew in the plane designated as our President's Airborne Command Post: the Doomsday Jet.
    I've spent seven years as the chief engineer of a company that built bar-code readers.
    I spent thirteen of the most enjoyable years of my life as a scoutmaster, and three, nearly as good, as a cubmaster.
    I joined the Air Force to learn jet-engine mechanics, but ended up working in broadcast and closed circuit TV, serving in such unlikely locations as the War Room of the Strategic Air Command, and a broadcast television station on the island of Okinawa.
    I don't usually fall off the horse I'm riding. I've been involved in sports-car racing, scuba diving, sailing, and anything else that sounded like fun. I can fix most things that break, sew a fairly neat seam, and have raised three pretty great kids.

    Once, while with a group of cubs and their families, one of the dads announced, "You guys better make up crosses to keep the Purple Bishop away from your tents." When I asked for more information, the man shrugged and said, "I don't really know much about the story. It's some kind of a local thing that was mentioned on my last camping trip." Intrigued, I wondered if I could come up with something to go with his comment about the crosses—something to provide a gentle terror-of-the-night to entertain the boys (and maybe keep them from wandering into the woods, alone, later that night). The result was a virtual forest of crosses outside the boys' tents. That was the event that switched on something within me that, now, more than forty years later, I can't seem to switch off.
    Stories came and came... so easily it was sometimes frightening, stories so frightening that one boy swore he watched my eyes begin to glow with a dim red light as I told them (I never told him it was the campfire reflecting from my glasses).
    Then, someone asked for a copy of one of my stories, which brought me to the keyboard of my computer. When that was finished, I wondered.... Could I write something other than technical articles and campfire stories? Something with dialog?
    "Something with dialog," when completed, led to: Can I write in the first person? Do an adventure? A romance?
Now, retired, writing is what I do. It keeps me off the streets at night.