Dean Whitlock

I’m a military brat. My father was in the Air Force for a period that spanned WWII, the Korean Conflict, the Cold War, and Viet Nam. We moved frequently and traveled on holidays: I lived in ten states and three foreign countries, and visited many more. I learned to fit in quickly and to appreciate new cultures. I learned that there are many ways to live, many points of view, and none of them are 100 percent right or wrong.

Traveling so much gave me plenty of time to read in the car, on the boat, and in the plane. I loved history and science, but also developed a taste for science fiction and fantasy – literature that was filled with even wilder cultures, more points of view, and greater differences than the places I traveled to. I still love to travel, and I still enjoy escaping into a good book, particularly if it can teach me something new or move my heart. Along the way I picked up the trade of writer. Reading was the start of that career: writers develop from avid readers. I made my first sale in 1982, my first professional sale in 1985, and sold my first novel in 2003. And the reviews have generally been good. I'm proud to say that two of my stories have made it into Gardner Dozois' annual best-of collections, one was a top-ten choice in the Azimov's SF annual reader's poll, and my novel Finn's Clock won First Place in the YA category in the 7th Annual Writer's Digest Self-published E-book Awards.

For the past 45-plus years, I have lived the whole time in the same town in Vermont. (On Vermont’s “East Coast”; the Connecticut River Valley.) But I still have an itch to move and have managed to live in three different houses in two different villages in that time – a far cry from early days when we moved every three years or less. As for work, I’ve been a lab tech and a carpenter, but quickly moved into journalism and from there to technical writing, marketing, public relations, and then everything to do with writing. I’m a story-teller who writes it all down (and a bit of a graphic artist and teacher to boot).

As for my indie publishing house - Boatman Press - it’s part of a story I wrote and one I like to live. I own three canoes, and built two of them. I paddled most of the length of the Connecticut River in one of them, 370 miles from Canaan, Vermont to Long Island Sound. I also have a Nordic pram that I built (with a lot of help) at WoodenBoat School. I’m currently adding a sailing rig. And I wrote a novel set on an ocean liner. It’s all part of that wanderlust I learned growing up.