October 28, 1955
I grew up in Eugene, Oregon, but spent most of my life in California. My mother's parents owned a ranch in the Sierra Nevada foothills near Oroville, CA. We spent summers and holidays at the ranch, playing outdoors in the daylight, then blanketed by family history held in the furnishings, structure and smells of the ranch house after sunset. My parents ran Far View Ranch Camp (a children's residence camp) at the ranch for 29 summers, and I was there for most of them. In the last few years of their camp, I developed a close friendship with another camp counselor, Robin Setchko, and we started down the relationship path that finds us still in love today.
Relationship has been a great teacher. I'm grateful to Robin for sticking with me through the hard times — mostly communication challenges. I know now that as a human being I default to the frightened animal when threatened. Early on, I thought every argument came from some truth that had to be placed on the table. In recent years I began to understand how partnership benefits from taking responsibility for my own experience, and admitting that my primary interest is simply to be loved.
Robin and I ran the camp for a while after my parents retired, and that experience was also a great teacher: taking responsibility for numerous loved ones; learning to set firm limits with children and young adults from a place of kindness; leading others toward meaningful goals; living with my own limitations while stretching capabilities I'd never known. I recall my state of mind on the first day of our first summer session, worried sick (literally) about my ability to take on such tasks.
Our decision to marry and have children came several years later. We were cautious, and wanted the glue to stick. Ellen and Michael were born into the camp atmosphere. Michael was younger, and his first summer at camp happened to be our last. The novel Sky was born the summer after Ellen was born, and until this day the story has grown, bit by bit, to the point of publication.
While living in Eugene, my first real job at a pizza parlor gave me cash for flying lessons. Breaking free from the surface is a wonderful but small taste of what astronauts feel, and I dreamed of flying to the moon and beyond. My closest approach to space travel came through reading science fiction, but I kept flying, finally owning an airplane afforded by a small inheritance.
I attended a few different colleges before finally settling down on Physics at Sonoma State University. One of my professors became my employer after graduation, and from an acoustics perspective, I dabbled in electronics and computer science. When we stopped running the summer camp, the internet was becoming a major event, and I headed in that direction, programming for three small companies until burning out on the the experience. By that time, Sky had finished emerging, and had seen several revisions.
Soon after solar panel costs dropped, the time was right for installing a home system. Ellen and I got the electric car bug and did a complete conversion of a small pickup in her high school senior year. That experience was like taking the "red pill" (Matrix), and I can't and won't go back to ICE cars!
I currently work at Thunderstruck Motors supporting DIY electric vehicles of all types, directing creative energy toward meaningful goals with people I enjoy.
I'm now in my sixties, feeling mortal yet grateful, and open to the next steps. Sharing Sky with a greater audience is one of them. My publishing collaborator Kim Stufflebeam created this website, and we hand-created two final copies of Sky for release to early readers. Before passing away in August 2019, Kim and I made plans for a serial chapter release of the novel on this website, and creating twenty five more handmade copies.
I continued our work, holding Kim's passion for the project close for encouragement, and posted the first section of the book here for interested readers (see the Reading Room). I continued the bookbindinding process, creating an additional fifteen copies of the handmade edition. All but two of these have been sold or gifted to friends and supporters.
A previously backburnered plan to publish a monochrome version through a print-on-demand service began to slip back into the forefront. Working with Amazon's CreateSpace, I used the latest manuscript to create a text-only version for paperback and e-book release. This involved some reformatting and minor edits, and I created QR Code links to graphical elements including the stereogram foldout pages, so readers could experience some of the original visual impact.
Sky can now be purchased on Amazon.com as a paperback or an e-book. I very much hope you enjoy Sky. I would love to hear from you about your experience reading it :-).
- updated June, 2024