I was born at an early age (OK, age is just a number; mine is unlisted) in Kualakapuas, a Dayak village in Central Kalimantan on the island of Borneo.  My parents were missionaries--Clan McGregor Scotts by ancestry, Americans by birth.  At the time, Kalimantan was ruled by the Netherlands and known to foreigners as the Netherlands East Indies. Shortly after my birth, a Japanese invasion appeared imminent; we all returned to the United States.

We waited out World War II in Springfield, Missouri where my father wrote and edited for the Gospel Publishing House.  After the war, we returned to Borneo, and lived in the coastal city of Banjarmasin.  The way back was long and hard; civilian transportation was still very limited, and while the Army Air Corps would fly us on a space-available basis, very little space was available.  We waited 3 months in Adelaide, South Australia, and another 3 months on the island of Ambon in the Moluccas, or Spice Islands.  By the grace of God, none of the Japanese munitions I collected from the Ambon beaches exploded.  I did, however, develop a fondness for mangos that has never left me.

After Borneo, we lived outside Manila, the Philippines, where my father helped build the Far East Broadcasting Company.  My father never had a slow button, and after just more than a year, he collapsed from exhaustion.  Our ship docked in Burbank, California on December 20--it snowed 6 inches just for our benefit.  We didn't own so much as a long sleeved shirt.

I met Charlotte Bowman at a basketball game in Springfield.  We had a long relationship while I dated her friends, and moved to Waxahachie, Texas to finish my schooling.  Eventually it all came together, and we were married in Harlingen, Texas.  The wedding cost $3.80; we had to scrape a little to pay for it.  Nowadays I don't gamble much; I've used up all my good fortune marrying that woman.  I've never met another I thought would be half the wife, mother, and friend Char is.  The chorus of a song by Neal Hagberg and Leandra Peak probably best describes our relationship.  

We've got an old love

One we never will get tired of

One that fits us like an old glove

One to warm a winter's  day

We don't have to say I love you

Quite as often as we used to

Old love just goes without saying,

But we'll still say it anyway

When I was 18, just before I married Charlotte, I enlisted in the US Air Force.  On my Statement of Personal History, I listed 21 residences.  I ignored places we had lived less than 3 months.  

The marriage, and  various remote assignments, produced 6 children.  One lived 30 hours before succumbing to a lung disorder.  The rest continue to make me proud, and their children are making me a great grandfather.  I said age was just a number.

Although I wrote in school, fighting wars and raising babies (OK, Charlotte did most of the baby-raising) caused me to set it aside for some years.  While snowed in for a week at our Wisconsin home, I decided to write a short story to pass the time.  A little more than 100,000 words later, the novel Pastime came to be.  

The noted author of spy novels, David Hagberg, mentored me for a while.  His judgment, correct as always, was that Pastime was mixed genre; it is Earth-bound science fiction, but has whole chapters where no sci-fi takes place.  Just to prove I had it in me, I wrote The Devil and Omorti's Circle, an off-world novel that expands on some of the alien races introduced in Pastime, and has a few of its own.

A Level-Three Correction is a short story that further develops two of the alien races of earlier works.  I wrote it to see if I could write a piece that had no slow passages.  I give it a B+, but you may judge for yourself.  

Alaya is a departure for me.  Fantasy, rather than hard science fiction, it is Swords and Sorcery without the sorcery.