Author

I wrote my first story in 5th grade. It was, of course, terrible. I thought all you needed was a plot, and a clever way for the hero to solve whatever problem was presented. Basically a DC comics non-featured story in one of their dime comics. In high school, I mostly wrote non-fiction, usually satires of everybody at the school, especially the administration and teachers. Our principal's last name was Foucar (pronounced foo-kar). How could I resist writing about Mother Foucar? Or the just-this-far from senile Civics teacher? Or the brilliant but somewhat crazed German teacher? Or the 5'3” barrel-chested, ramrod straight WWII Marine veteran of Iwo Jima English teacher who was never caught off guard? 

It was then that I decided I wanted to be either a writer or an architect. I realized architects mostly do jobs where someone else tells them how to do it, so I nixed that in favor of the fame and riches of a freelance writing career where I could do whatever pleased me. What can I say? I was young and naive. In college I majored in History because English required too much Chaucer, and I wanted to learn something worth writing about. 

I started writing a novel as a freshman in college, got 60 pages in, realized it was crap and that I needed to teach myself how to write before I tackled anything as ambitious as that. I did that thing as Roger Zelazny would say I concentrated on making entertaining plots that might make people shake their heads. An early one was two professors talking as they waited for a computer to output its solution on how to make a computer think, and ended with the computer typing out the scene they were in to the extent that it repeated the professors' own conversation until they tried to stop it before it took over the story—they weren't fast enough. I guess I've been thinking about AI for a long time. Then I worked on creating characters for you to care about, but what the heck does an 18 year-old know about depth of character unless you've had a very traumatic childhood? 

I sold my first story at 26, but then spent 40 years as a software engineer from punch cards to AI. I'm now back to my original love, writing. A Geek's Progress chronicles my software career. Advance Guards is my first novel. More to come, along with many short stories, and non-fiction of all sorts at my website frank-hood.com.