A Brief Bio
I was born in Poughkeepsie[1], NY, about 70 miles north of New York City, and grew up mostly in upstate New York. It's a beautiful place up there. A strong tradition of arts and crafts and alternative lifestyles (Woodstock[2] is one of the state's best-known towns) counters the general trend in America toward soulless strip malls.
I spent most of my early childhood in a Victorian house in Poughkeepsie, and my teen years in Saugerties in the Catskill Mountains (near Woodstock). Between the two periods, I lived for a year in Bolton, my mom's home town in the north of England. I've got a younger brother and an older sister -- Chris and Liz. We're close enough in age that we shared most of the same experiences.
Most of what I know, I learned in the Victorian house in Poughkeepsie. How to hide electrical experiments from my parents so that I can risk electrocuting myself blowing up steel wool, for example. How to replace fuses blown by such experiments. Or how to weave whole sections of the house in yarn pretending to be tent caterpillars. Or how to collect actual tent caterpillars in jars and leave the lid off with the theory that they won't crawl out, only to have them crawl out so that my mom discovers them in my brother's bed.
I also developed interests including drawing, classical music, writing, and computer programming. It became clear I was a creative person: whatever field I ended up in, I'd say I was destined to make things, and also be a bit of a mechanic.
I'm a curious person and I like knowing how things work. I think this could explain a lot of what I find fun to do. Writing is about creating, but it's also about investigating. You can't write well unless you find out what makes good writing tick. I like listening to good music because there's a lot to learn about how it's put together. It's another kind of mechanics.
I'm an aesthete -- I've got an aesthetic instinct. I'd describe it as a visceral response to form, plus a plasticity -- an ability, or willingness, to train my visceral response, improve it, tune it. Everyone has visceral response to form to some degree -- we all recognize 'ugly' and 'pretty'. But I like to play with my perceptions. I like to stretch them. Perception is a kind of intelligence, after all, and I always welcome more of that.
...
My dad was born in the US, my mom in England. They met in New York City. My dad's a computer scientist, and worked for most of my life at IBM (hence the upstate NY life -- IBM has important facilities there).When I went to university, at Cornell, I decided to major in English. At the time I wanted to be a writer. I'm not a writer (except as far as this is being a writer), but I'm glad I got a degree in English anyway. Being a good writer can make one seem more intelligent than one is. Plus, I reckon I'll publish some books sooner or later. Whether I'll ever publish fiction is an open question.
Thanks to my mom's being British, I've been able to get dual British/American citizenship. In 2002 I moved to London after living in New York City for four years. Since moving here I've become primarily interested in Web development. That's the most literary kind of programming, so it's a good fit for me.
I still write, though I expect most of my writing efforts will be aimed at the Web for now. I like the immediate feedback, the sense of being directly engaged with my audience. It's very different from working alone at night on something that has to go through a publisher before being read by anyone. Is it possible that the Web is the new way to write? I've started to wonder if Web writers[3] are not the emerging literati of the new century. It would certainly make sense to me.
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[1] Puh - kip - see. From Wikipedia: "The name derived from a Native American word (roughly U-puku-ipi-sing), meaning 'campsite by small water', referring to a stream feeding into the Hudson."
[2] Image from http://www.livingpictures.org/woodstockny.htm
[3] By "Web writers" I mean people who write directly for the Web. I don't mean writers for traditional publishing companies whose work ends up on the Web. The difference is that Web writers work for themselves and publish whatever they want. (I would call them "bloggers", but that implies that they're publishing in the form of a blog, which they might not be.)