In high school writing came easy to me, it was the only way I could express myself naturally. My high school English teacher, Ms. Williams, encouraged me to write, and I always passed the course requirements without any difficulty. I usually wrote poems or what I believed to be songs that I hoped could be set to music sometime in the future. I had a pile of things that I had written, but unfortunately, as time passed and life got busy, I lost all of my compositions.
An example of how important and healing writing can be for me is when I wrote a poem to my four-year-old daughter Laura after my first wife and I separated. I was in an all-night coffee shop and was feeling very depressed. As I wrote the poem to Laura I was crying. I have thought about this sad night many times throughout the years and I have always had the same sad memory; in an all-night café, crying, and writing a poem to Laura. However, about twenty years later, against all odds, I rediscovered that poem. Again, it brought up the same emotions. Again, I cried the same way I had the night I had written it twenty years earlier. From that experience learned that when one is writing from the heart, one's emotions, or spirit, can transcend time.
Why science fiction as a choice to write a story? I chose to write science fiction because I thought it would be and easy way to express myself and I have always liked the genre. I wanted my science fiction to be "more down to earth", or plausible, than some that has been written by others. I perused the NASA.GOV, files for hours looking for interesting things on the many moons in the solar system. I found a few and incorporated those ideas in my books as food for thought.