Walker Bennett, SF Author

Have you ever tried to write an "About Me"? I'm sitting here looking at a blank screen, stumped, and I'm supposed to be an author. It's like the stuff they make you put down on these computer dating services.<br><br>Well, I guess that's one thing about me. I write books and ebooks. I am a published science fiction author with three novels currently out in Europe and recently released in the U.S. with another right behind any day now.<br><br>I write mainly high tech Science Fiction and all three novels use the same characters (half American, half Russian) on different adventures. My writer friends call that a "trilogy", but since I haven't decided whether to stop just yet, I'll refrain from using that term. My current project is a cookbook especially for guys because, like the hero in my books, I'm also a gourmet chef (Mary Sue anyone?).<br><br>At various times in my life I've been a diver in the U.S. Navy, a disk jockey, an electrical engineer. I've taught physics at university, as well as computer engineering and design, computer programming and database administration.<br><br>My current day job is as a computer systems administrator, but I still have plenty of time to write (other than technical manuals). My wife and I are in the process of starting up an e-publishing company that will specialize in "unknown" authors.<br><br>What it boils down to is that I really haven't decided what I want to be when I grow up.<br><br>The sad thing is, I have never had a hobby that I haven't made money at...that takes a lot of the fun out of the word "hobby".<br><br>In high school I was interested in photography (became the school yearbook photographer, which got me out of a LOT of classes). Pretty soon I got good at it and began selling various pictures I had taken and doing portraits...there went the "hobby".<br><br>Since I lived just a few hundred feet from the ocean (San Diego, California), I figured that SCUBA diving would be neat...well, as a diver, Uncle Sam sent me on my senior trip to Vietnam. No fun, whatsoever.<br><br>In college I was introduced to my first computer -- about the size of the house I'm living in and less than 1/1000th the power and speed of what I'm sitting in front of at the moment (but it had 8K!! of memory!). When I got tired of talking to myself for a living as a disk jockey, I took my hobby in computers and made a living for the next 20 years. <br><br>Once I saw that kids getting out of fifth grade were as good as I am with computers, I turned to telling my woes to a word processor...what do you know? People actually give me money now to do that.<br><br>Science Fiction Writing<br>I guess my lifelong fascination with science and science fiction, space travel, Nicola Tesla, artificial intelligence (which I also made money at programming), the Russian people, and time travel made becoming a novelist inevitable.<br><br>Most of my friends are over-aged hippies like myself. We get together and reminisce about protest marches, bad wars, corrupt politics...heck, we can still do that! <br><br>Even though I'm remarried, I've got a mixed bag of kids from prior marriages. One's a cop (don't ask me how a hippie's kid turned pig), another married a Baptist preacher (REALLY don't ask how that happened), another is a mortgage underwriter, yet another is regional manager for a national defense contractor, and another is a semi-professional photographer -- talk about the establishment! Here I sit playing computer games and writing science fiction -- great example!