Stephen J. Simmons started writing shortly after he retired from the Navy, primarily because his children had grown too old to listen to bedtime stories and the cats never laughed at the funny bits.  He sold over a dozen flash-fiction stories to various online publishing venues, every one of which went out of business after buying his work, so he decided to try his hand at longer formats.  His first novel, The Galileo Syndrome, was released in 2014. Stephen grew up in a tiny hamlet in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, and went to high school in Albany.  He spent twenty-one years in the Navy, both as a nuclear operator on five fast-attack submarines and as an instructor in both of the Navy's nuclear power training schools.  He currently works as the nuclear information security manager for Newport News Shipbuilding.