To join Keith Soares' mailing list for updates and specials, visit his website at www.keithsoares.com.When I was about 13 years old, I wrote my first story. It was short but complicated, punctuated by a lot of twists and turns, and featuring a variable ending -- the reader made decisions along the way that affected what outcome they saw. That's because the story was a video game, written in BASIC on my home PC. I ended up writing a few more, adding custom images to gradually include another love for graphic design into the mix.A few years later, my teenage friends and I started a band with me on drums and singing. We wanted to be more than a cover band, so I began penning little stories -- songs -- sometimes even writing the music as well. After some years of singing in the dark behind the drum kit, I took up the guitar and moved to the front of the stage.Real life intervened as I graduated college with a degree in graphic design and went to work at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum on the National Mall in DC. There, I got to help tell fascinating stories via graphics and computers to the largest museum audience in the world. It was like sci-fi, but everything was real.I moved on from there to work a couple of other jobs before meeting my wife and starting a web, app and mobile development studio with her. There, I still get to tell stories, albeit in the form of games and educational interactives. I've guided readers on investigations of Edgar Allan Poe, breathed life into a flying monkey named Cheeko, and wrote a mystery that happens after midnight in a national art museum.Though very different, my work and mind-set owes a lot to authors like Arthur C. Clarke, who I always admired as a teller of very plausible science fiction tales. It is not uncommon for me to quote one of Clarke's three laws on any given occasion, especially the third: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." With my two daughters, it has been a lot of fun to see them believe in this sort of magic all the time. There are so many plausible and real wonders, so many mysterious and complex corners of reality to explore. I like doing that, while adding a dose of the unreal.Of course, I have also been known to quote many other books, movies, and songs as well. As Burt Gummer says, it's all just "a few household chemicals in the proper proportions."If you have a question about any of my writing, I'd be more than happy to hear from you. Contact me at my website, keithsoares.comCheers!K.