Jim Baen's Universe

Authors | A. S. Fox

A. S. Fox tries very hard to behave but often can't. More feminist than his wife, more left wing than his socialist professors and dreamier than his poet buddies, he errs on the side of error. He's pathologically incapable of day-jobbing it. So all errors in the end, well, end. I've done all sorts of menial work: Fortune 500 management, IPO of companies in NYC, headhunting, a brief stint working for the wrong Italian family, and the occasional floor that got scrubbed. My last 3 jobs in reverse are/were: headhunting in Sydney, being a Paraplanner for a boutique financial planning firm and washing dishes for a Kiwi entrepreneur who ran a sandwich shop.

My chief ambition in life is to be a pulp science fiction writer - something I've secretly harbored as a goal since perhaps eleven years old. That's when my father handed me The Hobbit. Game over, hack writer born. I write every day, most of it very bad - but my dorm mate Juno Diaz, himself an accomplished writer these days, told me that Hemingway had a simple formula. You sit down every day in the chair and you write. Period, no excuses. After a particular train wreck in my life I promised myself that no matter what - every day I was going to write for me. Being dyslexic makes proofreading interesting - just ask Rick Boatright.

I live in Sydney these days after having escaped Canberra which is cold. These are actually birds in the botanical gardens. It's so cold in Canberra they sit frozen to their perches thinking about the orange. The ones here fly really fast - so you get still life ala popsicle. I'm married to a brilliant and tolerant woman who supports my mad habits. She too has ambitions for me to become a hack science fiction writer. Michele is the smartest person I know.

To prove that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, I present my mother in law. I just call her mom. This is Alessandra. She lives in Texas Hill Country which is maybe the 2nd most beautiful place on the planet after Sydney.

Then again, we used to live in Hawai'i (that's the correct spelling for you haoles) and here's the photo of a typical Oahu sunset.

I did my masters coursework there in World History with a concentration on Hawaiian and Oceanic history. A team of smart historians recruited me to the Australian National University to do a PhD in World Indigenous History.

Mostly I take pictures of hearths and figure out how a civilization worked using reverse engineering. Given that these folks were geniuses with natural tools, they left a very small ecological footprint. Yikes. Here's a typical research photo.

This is my happy family. My mom is already bragging to neighbors that I got published. Mind you, she's probably showing my technical article in the Journal of World History first. Hey, that's Mom's prerogative. Me, I hide that I'm published in real journals - yikes. Besides 90% don't pay, it's just resume filler for academics.

In many ways my loyalty to Baen is even more profound than many writers. I took a risk and wrote David Drake on his personal website. I mentioned what was going on in my life and what I was trying to do as a writer. He graciously wrote back and made some suggestions. The story I wrote which is published in Baen's Universe came directly from that suggestion. So I feel pretty strongly about Baen's Bar and the process by which Jim Baen is going about revolutionizing e-publishing.

Giving it 14 Percent Full Story From: He was reading a comic book when it happened.