Jacks contact info is: jgs AT johngrayswan DOT com

Jack Swan

When I was twelve my Uncle Jack’s family came to visit for the Thanksgiving holiday. When they went home, my cousin Bill mistakenly left behind his copy of Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship. Some children, like my wife, are ready to read at age four. Most are ready by the age of six or seven. Some us are a little different and take longer than that.

When I ran into Tom Swift something clicked in my brain. It was the first book I read cover to cover, and I was hooked. From that day to this, I am rarely without a book (no, not an e-reader, a physical paper book). Books and their authors have been my friends and refuge for over fifty years.

As my obsession with Sci-Fi bloomed, I began to harbor the secret ambition to become a writer myself. It took a few years to get up the nerve to share this secret with others. When I told my mother, she was horrified. My father never took it seriously. My friends were like, “Yeah, whatever, dude.” My college advisor, who was the head of the English department, could hardly restrain himself from suggesting that I change my major to business.

Undeterred, I wrote reams of rubbish in my teens and twenties, while working a parade of low paying jobs. Here are the ones I can remember: short order cook, department store sales clerk (at least five different stints), file clerk, encyclopedia salesman, architectural library clerk, temporary lumber yard worker, temporary mason’s helper, public school custodian, market research pollster, substitute teacher, newspaper mailroom worker, furniture rental consultant, personnel technician, tutor, and pizza maker.

At the age of 29 my wife decided she wanted babies; I did, too, so I went back to school to get a Computer Science degree. I got a job, we had the babies, we moved to Austin, we raised those babies until they decided they couldn’t take it anymore and moved out.

I retired from software development at the end of August in 2016. After resting for a few months, I have returned to my first passion, hence this blog site. My fervent hope is that this batch of rubbish will not be anywhere near as bad as the batch I produced in my first iteration as a writer.

One of the first things you will notice about these stories is they are not science fiction. They are in fact thinly fictionalized accounts of stories I have been telling friends and strangers for many years. Most are based on events that occurred in my life; a few are apocryphal family stories. In my mind these stories are a way to get back in the saddle before taking on longer form projects. But, you never know, things like this sometimes take on a life of their own.

I would like to thank Nick Swan for suggesting this content.

I would like to thank Danny Swan for building this site. He did in two hours what would have taken me two months.

I would like to thank Jen Swan for being my first reader. She spots the missing words, the misused homonyms, the nonsensical sentences, and the awkward constructions. She basically keeps me from posting a total embarrassment.

I would also like to thank them and others for letting me borrow their personas.