“The best way to predict your future is to create it,” Abraham Lincoln said and as bestselling author, entrepreneur and agent of change Seth Godin wrote, “If you are deliberately trying to create a future that feels safe, you will willfully ignore the future that is likely.”  Now, you may ask why I am beginning my biography with these two quotes.  I am starting my biography with these two quotes because they represent the type of thinking that shapes my reasoning and my life and my writing.

I am a future fanatic.  As far back as I am still capable of remembering, I have always been interested in what is next, what is over the horizon, what will be the next innovation or invention and how it will change the world.  Unfortunately, I am neither an inventor nor an innovator.  Instead, I have been lucky enough to be required to adopt, adapt and employ inventions and innovations in my work as a writer.

For several years, it was my challenge as well as my pleasure to write military scenarios for NATO and U.S. military training exercises, and lately, scenarios for developmental wargames for the U.S. Army’s Future Warfighting Division.  All of the scenarios I developed and wrote required that I look to the future and consider environmental challenges, incorporate socio-economic changes, recognize cultural and demographic differences, and introduce newly developed weapons and tactics.  To use the proper military acronym I was responsible for ensuring that my scenarios moved all the elements of PMESII, which stands for Political, Military, Economic, Social, Infrastructure, and Information, into the future.

Now that my time with the military is done, I am engaging those same forecasting skills and my diverse knowledge to investigate, consider and discuss what the future may hold for the world.  I don’t know what I don’t know I admit, but I am always ready and excited to learn something I didn’t know and then to share that information with others.  For as Charles F. Kettering said, “My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there.”