Welcome to my worlds. 

also

I must be incredibly paranoid. even my secret identities have secret identities. I am known as CelticSmith in some circles (like Facebook) and Professor Von Teasa in others like the burlesque world. I was even known as Bluebeard for a while because... well my beard was an awesome indigo blue all the way up to my temples, but pirates are now terribly passé (thanks ever so much Johnny Depp) so I gave that up.

For some reason I seem unable to be trapped into an easily quantified category. For example, I graduated from College with a degree in fine arts, sculpture to be precise. So of course I have been building military and police bomb squad robots since 1994. When I sing karaoke, I sing the words from Green Acres, but the music is with Purple Haze or the Beatles “a day in the life”. That really annoy the “serious” karaoke singers, by the way, but really.... who in their right mind is a "serious karaoke singer?"

My day job is an adventure. Never know what sort of problem or phone call I might get. I really do enjoy working with my hands. Working with your hands gives you hours and hours for your mind to wander. All sorts of things come up. My design for the magnetic pulse aneutronic boron fusion reactor, for example…

But let's try to be more relevant to the current subject… such as about these books that I am writing.

I have written lots of things, technical work instruction, first for myself, but later for others, to transform the complicated processes of building robots into simple terms so almost anyone could do it. Then explain how an bomb squad robot operator can perform complex repairs of delicate electronics from half a world away.  Later there was a phase of poetry, nothing quite so bad a Vogon, some has even been judged as quite good in harsh and unsolicited ways so I suppose that those opinions can be trusted not to be sycophantic.

I am educated far better than any papers could prove. Admittedly, most of that education is seemingly useless. Non-Olympic combat fencing, biomedical studies of tendons verses the mechanical properties of steel cables, animatronics, all cool to know, but not terribly useful on a daily basis, Still, anything to avoid reality television, right?

So yeah, smarter than the average monkey am I, or at least smart enough to realize that what seems clearly obvious to me just might not be even remotely discernable to anyone else. Thus, I should be more patient and understanding of those with more limited universes to live in. But I can’t help yelling at the television when I see a blatantly obvious marketing campaign. I could write a book about it… Oh… wait…

Never mind that.

Here, let me show you some Easter eggs from my first book (book zero) as an example.

In the summer of 2010, I was at a particularly fun burlesque festival called ABS-fest in AshevilleNorth Carolina. It was there that I (figurative speaking) met William De Planetae for the first time. The first book in that series was written in and about the city and I took extensive notes while following him around. The places I describe are real, and Emily, (not her real name) actually did have an Uncle named John Payne who was a sculptor and did create The Wedge as an artist community. He died from a stroke less than a year before. Everything I say about him is true too, except for the parts I made up.

The referred to NPC character Marsten is only a half lie. She really does make singing bowls from ceramics in her studio in the Wedge which is also real. They are cool, I have one somewhere. She also ran the spotlight at ABSfest for the last few years.

The Cove is only half real. It is actually supposed to be a religious retreat for some religious leader that I hate, (Billy Graham I think) but it is just where I said it was. It is a center for creating more drug pushers for that ever so famous "opiate of the masses". It is far too nice a spot for the Professor not to have taken it for himself, and much less ostentatious then Biltmore.

Zebulon Vance is mostly real too. Not that he was the second president of the Confederate States of America, mind you. But he was the only person that I am aware of to have served as Governor of North Carolina in both the Confederacy (as the 37^th Governor) and the Union (as the 43^rd Governor).

So yeah, I do a lot of research, but only because the book made me do it. I mean The Book, not the book, by the way. It can be a pushy artifact.

And that whole section on chocolate truffles?  I made myself quite ill writing that, but it is all true. If you like chocolate and you haven’t been there you should go, it is right where I said it was last time I checked.

The Aneutronic Boron Fusion process is not my invention, I think that belongs to God (the ultimate physicist) but I am a great fan of it. My Fusion reactor and the Helium Plasma Cell are all me though. Like I said, I AM a fantastic inventor (in my mind).

At the very end of book one in the extra bits, Menelaus is often written about as the same person, but he is also sometimes the grandfather of Alexander, other time the brother. It seemed to be too good not to use, so I did.

 As you can see, this incredible lack of intellectual focus has become my favored writing tool.

Sometimes I think Book 1 is more like a prequel… maybe I should consider a rewrite of Book 2 into book 1 and make book one into book zero.

Something to consider...

Do I have a favorite author?

I am not sure if I have a favorite, but there are several that I favor. I must favor them since I have all their stuff.

My first full collections were Rodger Zelazney and Walter Jon Williams. Zelazney was the first book series that I tried to drown myself in after mastering the depths of J.R.R Tolkien. All of the Amber books, all the independent books, even the alien speedway stuff. I read it all. Walter Jon Williams was right next to Zelazney so I picked up my first of his books called “hardwired’ and Now I have all of his stuff too.

While I did start with Tolkien around age 7, they were my mother’s copies. I didn’t actually own any of his stuff until after the movies came out, and I wondered when his stuff had changed so drastically from when I had read it before. I remember adventure and fun, not dry boring descriptions of trave. "we went over the hil, and we saw another hill so we went over that..."

I read all the Conan books by Robert E Howard next. My father had the entire set. Then Thieves World anthologies by Robert Lynn Asprin. Then I moved onto the cyberpunk stuff… it was the 80’s after all. Bruce Sterling, William Gibson and many others. Then came Christopher Stasheff and his two universes, David and Leigh Eddings and their worlds, John Varley, Larry Niven, Douglas Adams, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Frank Herbert, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Stanislaw Lem., It was more or less at this point that the concept Interweave began to take shape subconsciously in my head. Of Asimov’s work, my favorite of all was not his robot stuff, but his 5 minute mysteries which all took place in a gentleman’s club where one of the members would bring a curious story of murder or theft and the rest would try and solve it.

All these are a part of me. They are the multiversity that clogs my mind with even broader possibilities.

Now I have Jeff Lindsey, Diane Duane, Laurell K Hamilton, Charlaine Harris, Jim Butcher, and of course JK Rowling. I live in a three bedroom house and one room is nothing but books that I read over and over, when I am not writing or reading something new.

Which brings us full circle, in a way...

My favorite book is obvious to me now,

It is the book that I have not read yet, but also the next one I am destined to love.

Here is a quick history of my life. I can imagine why you would want to know this. Alternatively, if you wanted to know something that I didn't elect to babble about... there is always the contact page.

I was born on the northern outskirts of Cincinnati, Ohio in the Year 1969. My first movie was 2001: a space odyssey and I watched the moon landing… although most likely without comprehension.  I was told by my mother that I was destined for great things. In retrospect, I thing she was just trying to give me a complex so I would be invariably disappointed in my life but I am getting over that.  It was a pattern of behavior that became endlessly repetitive like “There is no reason you can’t move things with your mind, the only thing stopping you is your lack of belief in yourself that it can be done”. Now that I am an adult, I see that this was a ruse for her to get around her own desire to move things with HER mind. If I or my sister accidentally proved it could be done, then she could overcome her own disbelief. Little mind game like that were de rigueur for the entirety of our live, I am fortunate that my mother outsmarted herself by choosing to no longer speak to me more than a decade ago. My sister was not so lucky.

 I remember 1976 as the first year that I actually knew what year it was, and how perturbed it made me when “they” changed it to 1977 without consulting me first. 1978 was the year I first read the entire “Lord of the Rings” saga, Hobbit first of course. I was a precocious child. Re- reading it 20 years later, I wondered where all the boring parts had appeared from. It was like I was reading a completely different book. Weird… 

In the sixth grade, just before I entered my teens, my mother (now thrice divorced) uprooted us from the Cincinnati suburb of Forest Parkand carried us off to the hinterlands of Oklahoma, three miles down a dirt road outside of Tahlequah Oklahoma to be exact. In those days being a survivalist was “cool” apparently. We had hidden rooms in which to store our survival rations such as legumes and rice specially packaged in pure nitrogen so they would be good for years, two triple sized water heaters, which would become potable water storage in case the worst happened, that sort of thing. My sister and I called our house The Bunker, (my half brother not being particularly chatty at that point because he was around two years old or so.) because that is what it closely resembled. It was actually a solid concrete basement; the house that was meant to go on top never got built. Mother ran out of money, I guess. Due to its solid concrete construction, and being only half buried into the hillside, I was treated yearly to snow in my room, along the walls and the solid concrete insulated roof, all winter long, and in the spring, it rained. Yet another brick in the wall of my detachment from reality, I blame you Floyd.

One can only take this sort of environment for so long, and my plans of escape, even though I was now fifteen, grew ever more elaborate. The last great scheme was notable as a spectacular failure, which is ironic since it was also the one that actually got me shipped out to live with my father in Knoxville, TN, leaving behind my sister and half brother to suffer under the wrath of the Dragon Lady (as my Dad’s new wife tended to call her).

Entering into Catholic school in my sophomore year was a bit of culture shock, being raised to understand and embrace multiple faiths, I had chosen Taoist to be my personal path.

There were two main groups of catholic chidren (St. Joseph’s and Sacred Heart) who had been together since their first grade school year, And so I kinda felt that I had entered into the play on the last act. Fortunately, if there is one thing young Catholics want to do, it is to explore ANYTHING that is not Catholic. I took the opportunity to reinvent myself once again, and while I never entered into the upper strata of the social scene, I certainly didn’t sink to the bottom either. I was nice and safe in the middle and slightly off to the left. It was in these years, and finally graduating, that I received an award for perfect attendance, and no one was more surprised by this  than me. I guess this school had been the first to keep me interested enough to not miss a day. Not an easy task.

It was now 1987. The eighties were almost done, though I didn’t know it yet. My first year of college was as a chemistry major. I liked it in High school. But my stepmother’s mother, who was a bit of a big wig with numerous patents to her name, took me aside and said, “You might want to consider an alternative.”

I figured she knew what she was talking about. So I made a compromise, chemical engineering. My Father was teaching Engineering Science and Mechanics, as well as being the head of the Biomedical Engineering Department (I suppose that when you are the only one in a department, that makes you the de facto head of it). It seemed a family tradition for me to become an engineer. My father’s father had been an aerospace engineer, even owning the patent for trim tabs on helicopters and running his own engineering firm in Dayton,OH. Science and engineering was in my blood…. But unfortunately, mathematics was not.  Sure I could do the calculus, in the engineering classes where there was a practical application, but when I had to do the same calculations in abstract for Calculus and Matrix computations classes…. 

Let’s just say I was not in my accustomed position within the bell curve of probability grading. So, year one, chemistry and adequate, year two chemical engineering and drop onto academic review. . Something clearly had to change.

My professor in the Material Sciences asked me in a private conference, “if you could do anything, right now what would it be?” This was 1989 and  I was into Renn-fairs, ninjas, and Jedi knights… Who wasn’t? I wanted to know how to make a sword by myself since I had always been disappointed by what was commercially available and I tended to be a hands-on kinda person.

“Shouldn’t you be pursuing a path that will help you realize that?” he asked.

My father did not agree. He was of the opinion that I could the math, I just didn’t want to. He wasn’t going to pay for me to change majors again until I had gotten myself off of academic review.

Fortunately, I had 6 months, to prove I was serious to my father.  I worked in the Levi’s finishing plant, three 12 hour shifts from 7 to 7 to make the money I needed to pay for the next semester of school.

 That third year I changed majors again , this time it was Art.

I wanted to build things, I had been doing that since I was just a wee lad, only I had been too busy to notice.  In art classes I shined. Where once there were poor grades, now I excelled. I stayed extra hours every day. Even though I became homeless (I was kicked out by my roommate, long stupid story there).

So I put my stuff in storage, lived out of my car, and spent even more time in the studio when I wasn’t working the back of the house at a Red Lobster as a prep cook and dishwasher. Then I discovered the night life… leftovers from the eighties. Drinking and dancing till dawn, sleeping for a few hours, going to classes, making my sculptures, a quick nap, work the dinner shift, back to the studio for a show and back to drinking and dancing.  It was a glorious time… for about 6 months. Then it all fell apart.  The clubs closed to be replaced by new ones, I met a girl, we moved into an apartment with my sister who had recently escaped Oklahoma. Suddenly I had bills, responsibilities, laundry…

I got married for the first time in 1991, I think. It seemed like a good idea at the time. It wasn’t but I didn’t know. She bought a dog, so we had to move to a place that allowed dogs, she took this as a cue, that we should get ANOTHER dog. So we moved again into a house that I ended up buying. So of course, two more dogs…

Hang on… how could I afford to buy a house?

Well the restaurant job had gone to the wayside, by then I had graduated with a Bachelor Degree in Fine Arts (sculpture) I had a job in a retail store in the evenings (Everything’s $1) and I was painting houses during the day… then I got lucky.

One of the assistant managers at my retail job suggested I give a resume to her husband. He worked for a factory that built robots.

I kid you not.

So, In 1994 I began to work at a company called Remotec. They built bomb squad and other hazardous duty robots for the police and military around the world, or rather they would in the near future, They had only been in business since 1991, where they first made a type of isomorphic robot manipulators for use by the nuclear facilities in Oak Ridge, essentially, they made Waldoes.

 When I joined in 1994, they were just in the middle of a large contract for the four main branches of the military (but not  the Coast Guard, yet). Fortunately I am a bit of a genius,well read, and very good at building things with my hands (art school) so I excelled in this new endeavor and THAT is how I was able to buy a house. Not a big house, mind you, but a modest one with a fenced in yard and a detached garage to make into a studio.

Then I got divorced…For reasons I shall decline to elaborate on.

But I kept the house… by absorbing my former wife’s debt. Was I screwed? Sure, but I got to keep the house, and all my stuff was there.

And so, as the ex-wife was moving out, I began dating a girl who was born the same year I got my drivers license. Again, it seemed like a good idea at the time, and it was good… for about a year, unfortunately the relationship lasted two years. The second year more than made up for that first one, karmicly speaking. Nevertheless I think that everyone should jump into this folly at least once in their life. Nothing helps you appreciate a good relationship like a plethora of bad ones.

So, where did I go from there?

I got married again in NYC on 9-9-09, because I hadn’t learned my lesson the first time. However this time has gone quite well, and then she dragged me into the burlesque world which has been loads of fun… but I never get to work in my sculpture studio anymore.

That last bit isn’t really her fault. I fell in to a deep black depression during my first marriage, go figure.  I have been medicated ever since….A habit I finally brok in mid 2013. and I haven’t been able to face my studio much from that time to the present day. So my creativity got buried under loads of anti-depressants and years rolled by. Stewing and smoldering like a toxic waste dump. I would occasionally dream things up, and then toss them into that pit to melt away. Little did I know…

Then one year, in 2010…. After a particularly great time at ABSfest , I met my main protagonist William de Planetae. He climbed out of that pit in the back of my mind and introduced himself. He showed me what had been going on in my subconscious under the clouds of anti-depressants. Old friends had survived the storms and new friends had sprung to life. Whole new worlds opened up to me…

It was too big. I couldn’t simply tell anyone about it. I couldn’t contain it… I had to write it down.

300,000 words and three years later, I am still going.

If only I could get them legitimately published.

Who cares if there is dust in my sculpture studio?

(I do still, kinda…)