Fred was born in Tacoma, Washington, but spent most of his formative years in California, where his parents pastored a couple of small churches. He graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1983, and spent 24 years in the Air Force as a bomber navigator, flight-test navigator, and military educator. He retired from the Air Force in 2007, and now works as a government contractor in eastern Kansas, providing computer simulation support for Army training.Fred has been married for 27 years to the girl who should have been his high school sweetheart, and has three kids, two dogs, and a mortgage. When he's not writing or reading, he enjoys running, hiking, birdwatching, stargazing, and playing around with computers.Writing has always been a big part of his life, but he kept it mostly private until a few years ago, when it occurred to him that if he was ever going to get published, he needed to get serious about it. Since then, he's written over 30 short stories that have been published in a variety of print and online magazines. His first novel, The Muse, debuted in November 2009 from Splashdown Books, and was followed in 2011 by a sequel, The Seer. You can find many of his short stories in a single volume, Odd Little Miracles, published by Splashdown Books in 2011. Speculative fiction is his first love, but he writes the occasional bit of non-fiction or poetry, just to keep things interesting.Random facts about Fred:* Age: Fifty-ish* Likes: Travel, coffee, dogs, football, animation, clocks, and waterfalls* Dislikes: Crowds, lawn care, politics, opera, spam (meat or electronic), and spiders* Favorite Authors: Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, C.S. Lewis, Ray Bradbury* Favorite Quotation: "Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves." Jean-Jacques RousseauA list of Fred's current publications in print and online is available on his writing blog at http://frederation.wordpress.com/publications