Joel Rosenberg has been called "probably the best -- and certainly the most talented! -- of the neotraditional SF writers", "the best thing to happen to science fiction since H. G. Wells," and "a veritable god who deigns to walk among men."

Which only goes to show that you should never believe anything anybody writes about himself, particularly when it's in the third person. So let's switch to truth and first person, okay? I was born in 1954. An interesting year. It was the year that RCA introduced the first color television, the year of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, the year of the first successful kidney transplant, the year of Elvis' first commercial record, the year Ray Kroc started McDonald's, the year France begged in vain for the US to bail them out at Dien Bien Phu, the year of the Bikini Hbomb test. Einstein was still alive, but he wasn't going to be for much longer. Sun Myung Moon founded the Unification Church.

A different world, in a lot of ways.

We lived in first in Hatton, then Northwood, North Dakota -- a little town of about a thousand folks -- for a few years, then moved on to Connecticut. It's about here I'm tempted to discuss my remarkably dysfunctional family-of-origin, but I did promise to keep this short. Check out the essays, if you're interested. Or don't. Short form: best estimates are that two-thirds of abused kids don't go on to be abusers themselves, and I do my best to be part of that majority. 

That was the year of Thor Power Tools, the year that the Shah fled Iran and left it to the Ayatollah, when Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, the year John Wayne died of the cancer that he caught while playing Genghis Khan, the year of Three Mile Island and Donna Summers' Bad Girls. And the Sony Walkman.

I was working at the Mansfield Training School, a home for the institutionalized mentally retarded, when, one morning, one of the folks I was taking care of slammed the door on my toe -- real, real hard. Right about then, it occurred to me that if I was a science fiction writer, this wouldn't be happening.

It was Halloween of 1981. Walter Cronkite had retired early that year; Charles and Diana had been married for a couple of months; MTV launched itself; and IBM released the original PC. Miami Vice and Hill Street Blues were the hot new shows on TV.

I rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter and stayed up all night writing the first two chapters of my first novel, which I called Dragon at the Gate, later retitled The Sleeping Dragon. It, along with a second Guardians novel proposal, was sold a year later, and published a year after that; I'm told that it's never been out of print since. Felicia and I were living in Willimantic CT then, in a onebedroom apartment with an upstairs neighbor we used to refer to as Thumper.

I was working as a bookkeeper, and then as a night desk clerk at a motel; Felicia was waitressing. That was the year that the Shaboo burned down; I was probably the first person to call it in.

It's where I spend my working hours. There's a brace on my right wrist to minimize the carpal tunnel syndrome, and that's why I've got the funny-shaped Microsoft keyboard, too. The office is a mess, because every time I think about cleaning it, I decide I'd rather get back to work.

It's an interesting time. OJ Simpson was declared not guilty for the two murders he committed, and thousands of people cheered in the streets. The Bosnians are begging the U.S. to protect them from Serbian "ethnic cleansing." Yassir Arafat is living on the West Bank, and Newt Gingrich is the Speaker of the House. Sonny Bono is a congressman. I live in what used to be a duplex house in south Minneapolis, with my wife of seventeen years, my two daughters, my baby sister (who just turned twenty-five), five cats, one dog, a couple of dozen fish, and two computers, respectively: Felicia, Judy, Rachel, Sharon, Squish, Amy Surplus, Tobiko, Jake, Zoe, Apache, Rachel the plecostomas and the rest of the fish -- they're unnamed, Fred (the downstairs computer), and Ethel (the upstairs one).

There's a pool table in what was the downstairs living room. Every once in a while, I take a break from work and see how many balls I can run. I'm still working on the Guardians books, and like that. Writing is simultaneously both the softest touch I've ever had and the hardest dollar I've ever earned; but I get up every morning, take my dog for a brisk walk, then shower and head downstairs to the office.

Every weekday at 4:12, my watch beeps, and I go to the door to see the schoolbus drop off my five-year-old from kindergarten, and then she and I head out to pick her baby sister from daycare, and I spend the next few hours, until the girls are in bed, being a Daddy.

And like all of that a lot.

Next slide. Me as a baby.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Next slide, please.
 
 
 
 
 
 

It's January 1979, and the slide is a picture of me screaming in pain while I am apparently hopping up and down on one foot.