- I've got a vivid imagination and anyone who knows me well, knows I talk to myself.
- I can create stories and stuff for multiple persona's pretty easily.
- I wanted to get my PhD in Plant Physiology and teach at the college level.
- My first acclaimed story was in the eighth grade using Get Smart characters in a Roman setting.
Let me go on and talk about number 3 above and this will give an insight into my writing. Before I graduated college, I took the Graduate Record Exam (GRE), which is put out by the same people that do the SAT, only this compares your knowledge to other college graduates, not high school graduates. I signed up to take the standard test and the specialty test for biologists. You need to have the test results to apply to graduate school. I also had five letters of recommendation from five of my biology professors, including my plant phys. prof that wrote a 6 page typed letter of recommendation that was just awesome.
GRE results: I considered myself a pretty darn good student of biology, and I still do, but...my results of the GRE were just average, which isn't really bad since I was being compared to other college graduates, but for graduate school, perhaps not enough. But another score from the GRE shocked me:
I scored within the top 4% in Reading Comprehension and in the top 6% in Verbal Reasoning. WOW. This is comparing all college graduates that took the test on that day, including those, I assume, in literary majors. I should have been a lawyer, except stealing and being a general troll is not my style. I was dumbfounded. Here I thought my skills were highest in science, and all along, I was an literary guy.
So what have I done with those skills? At some employers, I was the person to review laws and regulations and give interpretations. Reasoning has it's value in deriving something new and I've invented a number of new tests, methods and other stuff. I've done ad copy for places I've worked as well as for my own business. I've written scripts for radio commercials, product descriptions with fictional characterizations, stories about dolts I've worked with for amusement among employees. Yes, lots of things.
The science still plays a part in my life though. My books usually have some sort of scientific tidbit or slant to them that the average person has no idea about. Of course since I write fiction, many may not believe it anyway.
That's enough about me for today.
