When I was a little kid, my heroes were the astronauts that flew in NASA’s Gemini and Apollo capsules. I watched, fascinated, as Edward White opened the hatch of his Gemini capsule and floated, attached only by a slender umbilical cord, the first American to walk in space. I also watched, horrified, a few years later, when the news reported the flash fire in the Apollo 1 capsule that killed Ed White along with Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee.
Two and a half years after that, my Dad and I sat up on the night of July 20, 1969, glued to the television set, as Neil Armstrong uttered the magic words, “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind,” and stepped out onto the Lunar surface. I was ten years old, and I hoped one day to walk on the moon myself.
I loved both real science and science fiction, and I filled spiral notebooks with unfinished stories of boys like me living on Mars, and on Titan, and on starships crossing the intergalactic void.
As I grew up and had children of my own, the dream of going into space died. Overweight, poor eyesight — I was not astronaut material at all. But I still dreamed, even as I wept over the loss of the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia, of space.
In fact, I was lying in my hospital bed, just having awakened from an eight week coma after a head-on car wreck, when I was shocked by the news of the destruction of the Columbia.
I had spent the previous thirty years writing songs, and singing, and playing the guitar; but all of that came crashing down with the car wreck that put me in the wheelchair that I needed to use until recently.
Since that time, I have gone back to writing stories. I finally learned how to finish them, too, and I still love science fiction.
Pursue your dreams, and they may become your reality, too.
Now I have some books available at online retailers, with several more in the works.
If I can do it – so can you!
