George Shaffner

My sister and I were raised by a stay-at-home mom and a career Air Force pilot. Like most military families, we were nomads. We moved from Texas to Tennessee, to Florida, back to Texas, and on to England. Then, by the hand of a conspiracy that may have reached the highest echelons of the Pentagon, we ended up in Omaha, Nebraska, where I graduated from high school.

On June 5, 1970, I was commissioned into the Air Force. On June 6, I received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Nebraska (which may have been an act of kindness). On June 7, I married the lovely Grace MacIntosh. My life was turned upside down in three days; it took me decades to adjust, although Grace says I’m still a work in progress. History does indeed repeat itself. During my so-called career, which included two years in the Air Force and 30 in high–technology, we lived in Nebraska, Colorado, Louisiana, Silicon Valley, England, Washington DC, and Seattle. Our three children are adults now; they don’t move around much.

During my long life, I've had the good fortune to visit 48 states and 30 countries. When I was 14, I had a face-to-face, one-way conversation with the Sphinx, climbed Cheops' Pyramid, and touched Tutankhamun's sarcophagus. My wife and I spent 10 days in Venice before the floods and a long weekend at a five-star hotel in Paris while I recovered from food poisoning. I bodysurfed in 15-foot waves off the northern shore of Oahu and lived to tell the tale (barely). I watched my wife give birth to our third child and heard the surgeon who performed my subsequent vasectomy say, "Oops!" That was a tad traumatic. So was my first epileptic seizure, a near-death experience at the age of 38.

I had a lot of big titles in high-tech years, C-something of this and president of that, but basically I was a journeyman: I fixed small companies or parts of larger ones. It was challenging work. Every turnaround was unique, and the margins of error were small. One or two missteps could've caused scores or hundreds of honest, hardworking people to lose their jobs. Eventually, the pressure, the long hours, the travel, and the weeks away from my family took their toll, but by then the sum of my experiences had provided me with perspectives that were and remain unconventional—to say the least.

Those perspectives are the souls of my books, the first of which was a compendium of essays called The Arithmetic of Life and Death. It was followed by a trilogy: In the Land of Second Chances, One Part Angel, and The Widows of Eden. The production version of my sci-fi novel, The Apex Child and the Last Days of the Middle Class, is now available online. The Dakota Coup, a modern-day novel based on the Battle of Little Bighorn and consequent events, will be published later this year, maybe. It won't be done until it's done.