About The Author

Steph- who? Huh?

My name is Stephen Stone Edwards II. I was born, raised, and currently live in the sunny state of Arizona with my beautiful wife, my two lovely daughters, and of course, the family dog. I am, without a doubt, one of the biggest geeks in the history of the personality type. I love science-fiction, technology, and using technology to create art. I currently work in the IT industry troubleshooting networking issues for a broad range of networking devices, everything from proxy servers, to high-end intrusion prevention devices. I'm Cisco trained (not certified, but then, who cares about certs these days anyway), and I have 14 years of experience with a wide variety of UNIX operating systems - BSD, System III, and System V variants included. Oddly enough, I can count the number of novels I've read in my life on two hands.

A Little History

I acquired an interest in storytelling at a very early age - six to be exact - when my mother and father took my sister and I to see George Lucas' Star Wars in the summer of 1977 at the now legendary Cine Capri theater in Phoenix, Arizona. From the very beginning, to the very end, I was absolutely speechless at what was displayed before me. My Mom and Dad tell me that I didn't even bother to eat any of my popcorn because I was so enthralled by the movie. I can remember thinking to myself as we walked out of the theater "I want to make something like that!" To say the very least, seeing Star Wars at such a young age was a unique experience, and it is one of only a few which has influenced the direction of my life.

It just so happens that I also developed an interest in computers at an early age as well - nine to be exact - when my father brought home the very first computer I would ever use: a Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80 Model II with 32k of RAM. When Dad showed me some of the things it could do, I took to it like a geek to binary. I wrote my very first program in the BASIC programming language by the time I was about 10 years old. Since then, I've owned and/or used just about every computing platform you can think of: Intel-based PCs, Macs and PowerMacs, SGIs, SUNs, DEC Alpha workstations, HP PA-RISC workstations, yadda yadda yadda. I have always been enamoured with computers and computing, but I didn't stop there.

In 1982, Dad took me and a buddy of mine to see the movie TRON, which was one of the first cinematic releases to use computer generated imagery. I was absolutely blown away by what I saw. It was unlike anything that had come before. When I got home, I desperately began to research what kind of software I could possibly put onto my beloved Commodore 64 to allow myself to create such imagery. Alas, my humble little 6502-based wonder had no software beyond the capabilities of sprite generation and low-resolution 2D raster graphics. Imagine my joy when I discovered the Amiga seven years later.

I spent the vast majority of my high-school years locked in my room playing videogames on the dozens of gaming consoles I owned (in fact, I've owned pretty much every single gaming console that was ever released to the American market all the way up to the Microsoft XBOX (one of the few Microsoft products I had a reason to use)). My college years were not entirely different, as I spent about 5 years locked in my room creating 3D animation with my Amiga 2000 and Video Toaster 2.0. While many of my friends were killing braincells, hitting on girls, and living the typical college experience, myself and my geek bretheren were busy creating cool 3D graphics and sharing new-found techniques with each other, and having more fun than we would have been doing those other things. The big plan was to get into doing special effects for film, and to break into the moviemaking industry, which every single one of us wanted to do. I can honestly say without pause, "Wow, those were the days".

Despite my desire to get into the technical aspects of moviemaking, doing so was extremely difficult unless you knew the right people. Unfortunately, as with everything else, it's not always what you know, but often who you know. When I got out of college, I spent about nine years working in the digital prepress print graphics industry, where I learned an entirely different medium from which I was accustomed. After nine years, that venue's potential for generating a steadily-increasing base of income was on the decline, and I decided to get into IT, where I am currently working today. I am Stephen Edwards - computer geek, artist, and science-fiction author wannabe. ;-)

How This Book Came About

While I've always loved technology, I've always loved storytelling even more. While I was in college, I got an idea for a book (oddly enough, it's not the one you came to this site to find out about). One day, while I was attending one of my many computer aided design classes, I got an idea for a science-fiction story, however, I wasn't entirely certain as to how I should pursue manifesting this idea into some kind of a tangible product. I always liked drawing, ever since I was a kid, but I couldn't see myself spending my evenings trying to squeeze in time for creating a comic book on top of everything else I was trying to get done. Ideas were constantly flowing into my head. I even had to start keeping a notepad next to my bed, because I kept waking up in the middle of the night with ideas that I didn't want to lose a few hours later. Suddenly, it dawned on me: 'why not write a book?' I always had a penchant for writing, and while I never gave it much thought, I always did enjoy it to a certain extent.

When I started writing a book for the very first time, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. But after a couple of days, the sentences started to flow from my fingertips onto my CRT. But because I was spending so much time creating 3D graphics, that idea went onto the backburner in favor of using my computers for other tasks.

I decided to pick up my pen and start writing again in 2002, one year and one daughter after I got married. We sold our home, and we were going to move into our new house as soon as it was built, during which time, we stayed with my Mom and Dad. My wife decided that she wanted to take our daughter back to her home town in Illinois for a few weeks while I wrapped up the details on the new house here in Arizona. At that time, because there was little else to do outside of my eight to five job, I decided to take up my writing project again. But something happened. Suddenly, I was hit with a flurry of new ideas. I spent the next three weeks eating my meals in bed, writing like crazy. By the time those three weeks were up, our house was finished, my first book (the one this site's about) was about one-third finished on a small stack of yellow pads, and I had ideas for thirteen other books as well. Needless to say, those other works are still in progress, but I'm intent on finishing them nonetheless.

The great thing about writing is this: When someone wants to make something like a movie, they require the assistance of many other people - actors, directors, writers, producers, extras, special effects specialists, model builders, set builders, camera operators, etc. They have to find studio space to shoot on, and they often have to travel to different locations to shoot for different environments. Even if computer graphics are used, such a project still requires the intervention and cooperation of hundreds of people. The point is, it costs millions of dollars to create other worlds for others to see and/or experience on screen. However, I discovered something immensely profound with writing - it's possible to do the very same thing with just your mind, a pen, and some paper, all costing a whopping $4.95 from an office supply store. To me, this was a magnanimous revelation, as significant as that evening when I went to see Star Wars.

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