Quick life summary:
I did mediocre in high school, dropped out of college after two years, joined the Navy and rode in submarines for awhile, then finished college and continued on for a Master's in physics. During graduate school, I got married and started a family. I realized that PhDs don’t really make that much unless you are true top performer, which I wasn’t. So left academia and started working as a test engineer at nuclear facilities.
During this time, I published my first novel, 2100: Faith of the Machine, which you can read about here.
After growing the family a bit more (3 kids now!), my wife and I weren’t happy with our current life trajectory of work—>retire—>die, so I left the lucrative world of government contracting.
I've learned that no matter where you are in life, all your time can easily be over taken by something, whether it be work, a quest for more money, collecting stuff, etc. Prioritization is the key, and the desire to really finish something is what kept writing and music at the top of my priority list.
I'm still working on my second story entitled 2100: War for Sentience, a cyberpunk thriller that is a prequel to my first book. I hope to finish it within a year (Note: I orginally wrote that last sentence in fall of 2019, when I came up with Virtual Anarchy and wrote the first song, Neon Eyes).
Check out the Virtual Anarchy page to see how I’m tying in my original music to the next book!