Shameless plug!

OK- for lack of a better term this is a commercial. I've been writing since I was just a little kid. I remember when I was in Mrs. Coash's third grade class we were supposed to do a three paragraph story about something we had done. I wrote six pages on the first manned mission to Saturn, complete with illustrations of the Saturnian snakes. In fifth and sixth grade when we were supposed to be writing journals, I wrote fiction including speculation on where we were all going to be in the distant future of 2001 (my buddy James Kemery was president, and I was a brain surgeon out to save his life after a horrible hover-limo accident). I did sequels to movies I'd seen (my Mad Max III predated Thunderdome by about two years). In High School I started writing creative fiction as research papers, complete with made up references and footnotes. Why my high school teachers let me get away with it, I will never know. I suppose if you demonstrate the ability to cite work even if you made that work up in the first place, they're good.

When I joined my current firm, I'd been in about two years when I was reintroduced to something I'd played around with as a kid, but then hadn't seen in a while- the Computer. Specifically, programs like WordPerfect and later Word which allowed me to do things like "editing" or "revising" stories and moving them around without needing anything more than a 3.5" floppy. I started not only writing new stories but accumulating them.

So, my current firm helped me out, but it also held me back. I wanted to write professionally, but the simple fact was, there was no agreeing to any contract or deadline when you might at any moment head off to odd parts of the world to do 18 hour days.

On my last little jaunt into Babylon, I started a new habit. I was sending out draft reports each day, distributed to various organizations who needed the information to do their jobs. I'm not going to get into the types of reports, but they were dry, very dry, and there were a lot of them. I started sending out little music quotes or pop culture references in the subjects of the message just to break the doldrums inherent in the work. Then, late December 2007, one of my recipients recommended I do a little serialized story. A little bit a night, just to see who was reading.

So, on January 1st, 2008 I did. I started a story, one sentence a night for a week. I continued to write stories after that one ended, and they became more complex. I started experimenting with genres I'd never done before, with success (40's detective stories) and less success (western...yikes). People seemed to really enjoy it though, and when I left Babylon there were a few fans lamenting the fact I wouldn't be entertaining them any more.

As I've been back home, I have missed having the reason to write. It was a great challenge to have a daily deadline, but one that wouldn't get me fired if I missed it. I had a backlog of stories. So what did I decide?

Time to self publish.

So here I announce the birth of my Draft Distro Online. There will be two sections- one accessible to everyone with fan fiction allowing people to sample my writing. Then, a members-only section with my original work which I plan to update every two weeks or so. I invite everyone to check it out here. I hope you enjoy my tales- they won't change your life, but hopefully they will entertain you for a few minutes out of your day. Heck, you may even see a cameo appearance someday of the Saturn Snakes...

OK- end of commercial, we now resume my regular ramblings.