I was born in 1961, in Seattle, Washington, USA, and some of my earliest memories are of the US Space program: the Gemini flights, the Surveyor robotic missions to the Moon, and of course, Apollo. I was fortunate to see Neil Armstrong step on the Moon in July 1969. At the same time, I had a growing interest in science fiction. 

My mother’s reading of science fiction novels in the 1960s and 70s inspired my own reading as a young teen. I wrote my first two stories, both science fiction, for an eighth-grade language arts class. I began writing for publication in 1983 and collected a series of rejection slips from various “speculative fiction” magazines such as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, and Asimov’s Science Fiction. I received a personal note from OMNI’s fiction editor, Ellen Datlow, on a story rejection in late 1986 that keep me writing for years.

After I graduated from Portland State University with a Bachelor of Science in East Asian History in 1987, Multnomah County Library hired me as a branch clerk. I took the job thinking that I would work there for maybe four or five years before I succeeded at writing novels and could leave to write full time. For the first ten years or so I worked at the library, first as a clerk, then, starting a year later, as a library assistant (para-librarian) I believed I would leave shortly.  But my library career, my so-called “day job,” became an unexpected passion as well in my life, and my career lasted thirty-two years. 

I discovered both that the path to learning how to write fiction was a longer and more winding one than I had imagined, and that the library, which meant so much to me a reader and a patron, would mean even more to me as a staff member. I’ve included several photos from late in my library career, including one of me with “Joy” and her son “Joey,” who were living near my library branch in 2018-2019 while Joy’s husband worked at a local technology company. She brought Joey to the toddler story time I gave every Friday, along with several other Chinese mothers also living nearby temporarily while their husbands worked at local high-tech firms. She told me that I’d made a very positive impact on Joey, which meant a great deal to me.

I retired from the library in late December 2019, just days before the first news of the SARS-COV2 outbreak in China.  Staff held a wonderful retirement party for me and created a wall banner featuring covers of my novels, since my writing passion was well known and supported by them. 

Over the course of my time at the library, I learned that we are more than just ambition and desire, our community reflects us. No writer is an island. Certainly, I wasn’t.

My wife LeAnn and her unwavering support sustained me for the decades it took me to get to the point where I finally was able to write fiction worth publishing. There had been months and even years when I hadn’t been writing, especially in the later 1990s and early 2000s, but she never lost faith in me. 

I met LeAnn at an after-school job while we were both in high school. We might never have met if it weren’t for that job, at a small company in our town of Beaverton, Oregon, bottling automobile wind shield cleaner. I attended Aloha High, and LeAnn attended Beaverton. She began the job a month after I did, and was a sophomore, while I was a senior. We both loved books, and science fiction, and space travel. I asked her out three weeks later. 

We married in early 1982, on her nineteenth birthday. I was three weeks shy of my twenty first. We were both students at Portland Community College at the time, both majoring in accounting. However, I realized that field wasn’t for me, while she flourished. I eventually switched to history, since it was a passion of mine, and seemed like a great subject to study for a writer. My history degree also turned out to be enormously helpful in my reference work at the library.

One of our friends, the artist Lisa Fox, knowing we were big Star Wars fans, created artwork of us as Star Wars heroes for our 20th wedding anniversary in 2002, and presented it to us at a surprise party our friends threw in honor of that anniversary, and a photo of that artwork is included in my contribution to this time capsule.

I included photographs of LeAnn and I as teenagers when we first dated, later with our friends K.C. Ball and Rachael Buchanan, and finally, on Christmas Eve 2020, when my friend and fellow writer’s group member Jennifer Willis (whose works are also part of this time capsule) visited for a brief outdoors, masked up and distanced visit. We hadn’t seen each other in person in ten months at that point.

In 2009, I was a year into an intense craft study, taking several classes and a number of workshops. One of those classes was taught by a local award-winning science fiction author, Mary Rosenblum. The class was online, through the Long Ridge Writing school, but Mary and I could meet for the occasional lunch. She helped me more than I can say. After many years of thinking I would just finally learn enough by writing enough, she gave me the insight to finally develop the insight to evaluate my own stories. 

My first published story, “Dead Wife Waiting,” is included in my contribution to this time capsule, along with its two sequels, which form a tiny trilogy of one-thousand-word stories. The story came about because Mary invited K.C. Ball as an editor guest to the online Long Ridge Forum in September 2009 to answer our questions. 

K.C. was a talented writer of science fiction and fantasy, who had founded her own online magazine, the year before. She published the magazine quarterly, with each issue having a theme of sorts, which she posted online months in advance of the submission window for that issue. She mentioned that the upcoming Winter 2010 one had the theme of an encounter at a lonely crossroads at twilight. An idea came to me almost at once. I drafted the story, rewrote it, and ran it past my writers’ group at the time for their feedback. I rewrote it again, and emailed it to K.C. All the submissions had to be no more than a thousand words long. K.C. replied within a day. She liked the story, but requested two small changes, which I made, and she bought it, paying me twenty dollars for the story.

We became very good friends and collaborated on fiction together. Two of our stories were published, both in Perihelion Science Fiction, “The Rules Concerning Earthlight,” and “Running Tangent.” We came up with the idea for “The Rules Concerning Earthlight” in a brainstorming fiction workshop given by author Ken Scholes at Cascade Writers in July 2013, from a set of prompts the workshop as a whole brainstormed: “Moon, lifeboat, werewolf, stranded etc.” We had a back and forth via email, I wrote the first draft, she edited it, and so on. The same was true for our novella, “Running Tangent”, which is set on space station orbiting Enceladus, run by an artificial intelligence named Tangent.

K.C. was transgender, as was the love of her life, her wife, Rachael Buchanan. The photo of them, and LeAnn and I together was taken before a Mariners baseball game in August 2014 at what was then Safeco field in south Seattle. K.C. and I spent part of the game brainstorming what eventually became “Running Tangent.” That fall, K.C. and Rachael visited us, and I took a photo of K.C. at Powell’s Books in Portland, when she found a copy of her story collection “Snapshots From A Black Hole And Other Oddities” in the science fiction section there. K.C. passed away suddenly in August 2018 at 71. She made a huge impact on my writing and my life, and I miss her every day. 

The idea for my Empowered series came to me in flash fiction form in late 2010, when I wrote a short piece about a young woman with superpowers who had just been released from prison and faced villains who wanted to recruit her. That led spending a few months in early 2011 working on a young adult science fiction novel, but as the year wore on, I became increasingly interested in writing a serialized version, for self-publication on Amazon’s Kindle platform. I’d been following developments in digital self-publishing for a couple of years at that point. 

Mary Rosenblum encouraged me to self-publish. I eventually wrote forty thousand words, the first two novella-length episodes, by late 2012, but the format didn’t suit me or the story. I put it aside, attended more writing workshops.

At the World Science Fiction Convention in Spokane, Washington, in August 2015, I attended three panels on self-publishing. One of the panelists recommended Dr. Susan Kaye Quinn’s two books on self-publishing, Indie Author Survival Guide and For Love Or Money. When we returned home from the convention, I bought eBook editions of each and read them in a week. A couple of months later, I hired Mary Rosenblum to be my developmental editor for the Empowered series. She gave me feedback on the series and world building, as well as feedback on my outlines for the first three novels. The series was originally called Weed, because the hero, Mathilda Brandt (originally named Jolene), was a “weed” in the garden of the Empowered, a rebel. I drafted the novel in six weeks, helped by all the work I’d done on the previous, serial version.

After revising it, I sent it to a group of ten beta readers, which included three other writers, as well as my wife LeAnn. I rewrote it a second time in April 2016, then sent it to Mary, who told me that she stopped reading it after the first page, when she could tell that the voice was wrong for my hero. We discussed it over the phone, and I recognized the issue at once. I spent a month doing a complete “voice” rewrite of the novel, sent it to her again, and this time she did her editing pass. Her editorial letter on that is included, as are two others. I had to make another edit, this addressing my hero’s attitude, which Mary characterized as “woe-is-me”, in order to make her pro-active in tackling story challenges. Mary always emphasized the impact a character’s voice and attitude had on a reader’s experience.

She was right. Mary found the result much improved. She did a developmental edit on Traitor and provided crucial feedback on my outline for the third novel, Outlaw, emphasizing the need to open the story with Mat engaged in trying to find her sister, rather than considering her situation.

Mary’s insight into fiction had a profound influence on me. She had been nominated for the Hugo and Nebula science fiction awards, had won the Crosstime award for a novella, and had also published mysteries under a pen name. She became an avid pilot late in life. She died doing what she loved on March 11, 2018, when the small single-engine plane she piloted crashed while making an approach to a “grass strip airfield” in the middle of a wooded area near Battleground, Washington. The next day, which happened to be my birthday, I was interviewed by a local TV station about Mary, along with three other authors who had also known her.

She wasn’t just my editor and writing teacher, she was a good friend, and her advice and wisdom still guide me to this day.

I wrote two more novels in the Empowered series, Rebel, which was published a few months after Mary’s death, and the final book in Mathilda’s story, Hero, in May 2020, during the early part of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Also included is the prequel novella, Renegade, which was originally written both as a ‘reader magnet’ to help build my newsletter in late 2016, and because I really wanted to show how Mat tried as a teen to remain both Empowered and free. Mary was recovering from neck surgery at the time, and thus was unavailable to help.

My cats Simba and Mittens (littermates and brothers which joined our household when they were 10 weeks old) spent a lot of time in my writing office while I was working on the Empowered, which is why I included a photo of them in their cat bed.

When I worked on the Empowered series I would write on breaks and lunch hours at my library job, which is why I included a photo of that.

I also included my novel Spice Crimes, a space adventure novel, which was a tie-in to author Lindsay Buroker’s Fallen Empire series. In late 2016, as I finished Traitor, Lindsay, who I had met on social media four years earlier, announced that Amazon would be establishing a space in their Kindle Worlds publishing program for works inspired by her Fallen Empire series. Kindle Worlds was a venue where authors could license their intellectual property to be used in other stories, much like “tie-in” novels based on various media properties like Star Wars or Star Trek, and also a bit like fan fiction. Lindsay encouraged my interest, and I wrote Spice Crimes in two intense months in early 2017, during the time I published the first two Empowered novels on Amazon. Midway through the following year, Amazon shut down the Kindle Worlds program and Lindsay encouraged me to republish the novel on Amazon and the other eBook retailers, which I did. It was never a great financial success, but I really enjoyed the opportunity to write a space opera novel based in the Fallen Empire universe.

Gremlin Night is included because it was my first actual urban fantasy novel, whereas the Empowered series combined elements from superhero fiction, urban fantasy, and the thriller genres. I found writing it more challenging than I anticipated, and it took me a year from start to publication, a slow pace by the standards of digital self-publishing at the time. I have covers and plots for two subsequent novels in the series, but at this point, after two attempts to draft a sequel, I’ve shelved the series.

I also included an MP3 file of a theme song for Gremlin Night, composed by the PDX Broadsides, a Portland based “nerd music” (meaning songs often with science, or science fictional or fantastic themes and subject matters) trio. My wife and I had backed an earlier Kickstarter to help fund an album by them, and we did it at a level where the band would compose and perform a song for us, and LeAnn encouraged me to make it about one of my books. I choose Gremlin Night.

I’ve been in a number of writer’s groups over thirty-seven years. All but my current one were so-called critique groups, which were oriented around “critiquing” or providing informed feedback on members’ stories and novels. But my current (as of the time of this readme file in early 2021) group, is the exception, conceived as a brainstorming and mutual support group. Members will sometimes provide “beta” reading (feedback on an early draft) but the main point is to help brainstorm novels, unstick them, and also emotional and creative support. I attended a two weeklong novel outlining workshop at the University of Kansas in June 2013 given by author and teach Kij Johnson where participants workshopped each other’s novel outlines, providing suggestions and brainstorming together. It made a huge impression on me. 

When I returned to Portland, I realized I wanted to continue that process, and reached out to three writer friends of mine, Wendy Wagner, Rebecca Stefoff and Jennifer Willis. None of them knew one another, so this was a wonderful opportunity for them to become good friends, along with creating a brainstorming group.

Wendy, Jen and I all attended the 2015 World Science Fiction Convention, held in Spokane, Washington, where Wendy received the Hugo Science Fiction award for being part of the team that produced Lightspeed Magazine. The magazine itself was voted the Best Semi-Professional Science Fiction magazine for 2014. I included a photo of Wendy accepting her Hugo, and another of a print copy of Empowered: Agent posing beside Wendy’s Hugo in January 2017, during a writer’s group meeting at Wendy’s house.

I’ve had a lifelong interest in astronomy, space, and especially the Moon, which makes being included in this lunar time capsule especially thrilling. I’ve included photos I took in the fall of 2020 of the Moon as viewed through my 3.1-inch refractor telescope, as well as a photograph of the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn taken using my iPhone four days before the closest apparent distance of the two gas giants in the sky, which includes a waxing crescent moon.

While I was working on Empowered Traitor in the summer in July 2016, I was a program participant at the WesterCon SF convention held in Portland. On the final day of the convention, Monday, July 4th, the Science Guest of Honor, Bobak Ferdowski of JPL, hosted a viewing party for the Juno probe as it arrived at Jupiter, and a photo of that is included. 

Also included are photos from the 2019 Dublin, Ireland World Science Fiction Convention, which LeAnn and I attended. Specifically, the photos are space travel related—NASA Astronaut Jeanette Epps gave a presentation on astronaut training, and also was on a panel discussion of NASA’s Artemis lunar program. 

I’ve also included two photos of my youngest nephew, Bryce Heimuller, one of me reading to him when he was two in 2000, at the Oregon Coast, and the other of him graduating from George Fox College with a Bachelors in Illustration in December 2020. during the Covid-19 pandemic, which is why he is wearing a mask. Bryce and I are very close and share a kinship in creativity. He’s been illustrating since he was two years old, and now works in multiple media, animation, and has written several graphic novels.