About Chuq
Birdwatching
I have really fallen in love with birdwatching in the last few years. Not only does it get me outside and away from computers, it’s a very analog activity — very few easy, yes/no decisions. It is also a very accessible and easy to get started activity, but one that you can make as technical and challenging as you want — but there’s no reason why you have to if you don’t want to. Learning to understand all of the details and subtleties is a fascinating mental challenge and one I will probably spend a number of years working on — I am finally hitting that point where I don’t feel like I absolutely suck at it, to be honest. It’s really brought me closer in touch with the rhythms of nature and the area I live in and has encouraged me to explore the greenbelts and wildlands that Silicon Valley and the west coast are blessed with. And it’s a great hobby to combine with my camera. This has made me much more aware of and sensitive to the environmental issues in our modern live, which has made me a a strong supporter of Santa Clara Valley Audubon and The Nature Conservancy. Because our fellow humans need help, too, I also suport Habitat for Humanity.
Photography
My other great love is my photography. I first got involved in photography in high school but let it lapse, then picked it up again in the late 80′s and early 90′s but let it lapse again to focus more on my computer work. With the advent of digital photography, I got involved again and really saw the possibilities of perhaps turning it into a second career, especially after seeing people like Dave Cardinal and Bill Atkinson‘s success. For now, I am continuing to focus on my photography, not a photography business, but as you’ll see with this latest redesign of this site, the photography has a much higher profile and I plan on doing a lot more writing about it and make my images more of the centerpiece.
Hockey
Laurie and I are serious hockey fans and were season ticket holders with the San Jose Sharks since their first season in the Cow Palace, but after 20 years, we’ve given up our season tickets. When you’re committing to 35 nights a year (and many weekends) over six months a year, it limits your options, and for now, at least, we decided we wanted to try going to fewer games to give us the ability to travel more, and perhaps pick up hockey in other cities instead. Despite growing up in Southern California, I somehow became a fan of the Los Angeles Kings, but it wasn’t until I met Laurie, who grew up in the Chicago area as a Blackhawks fan that my interest in the sport went beyond casual. We spent a glorious, crazy year as the team webmasters for the IHL’s San Francisco Spiders their one year of existance at the Cow Palace (our motto: It’s a pit, but it’s OUR pit) and I still own and occasionally wear my sfspiders.com jersey proudly. I strongly believe that the roots of being a fan are in the small buildings and among those who play — you can’t call yourself a real hockey fan unless you’ve watched hockey in a building without an upper deck and the best hockey game I ever watched was the Victoria Salsa playing the Cowichan Valley Capitals in the old Victoria arena (since torn down and replaced by a modern building, of course).
I tend to enjoy most sports. I was a huge baseball fan for many years, and Laurie and I were season ticket holders for the A level San Jose Giants for years, but my interest faded. Laurie is still a big baseball fan and goes to spring training every year; I still watch games but don’t really follow the sport closely. I grew up a huge basketball fan, I find the current NBA unwatchable — someone please wake me up when they start calling travelling again. Basketball for me was Jerry West and Oscar Robertson, when the sport went “over the rim” and became a dunk game, it left me behind. It sure doesn’t seem to miss me, so that’s fine. You might also find me watching the Tour de France (I raced bikes in high school, when I had knees), CFL football (but the NFL is much less interesting) and even curling (but to be honest, even I can’t explain how I became a curling fan….). I have also been known to sit down and watch cricket — but I can’t explain how it works. In general, I enjoy watching competition, and when I was younger, I competed in a number of sports, most of them badly. I also officiated in high school, from football and basketball to umpiring baseball and even judging diving. Because of this, I’m well known for taking the side of refs in arguments, because it’s a damn lot harder to do well than fans give them credit for.
My Writing
I’ve written professionally on and off since the early 1980′s, publishing both fiction and non-fiction. Since I spent so many years at Apple and have written about Apple and the industry (see, for instance, this piece I wrote for the Guardian, and some of my commentary that I wrote when I left Apple: (part1) (part2) (part3 is no longer relevant) (part4) and my wrap-up ), I am regularly contacted to talk about Apple and/or Steve Jobs.
My non-fiction credits include both technical items that included stints as Contributing Editor for Macintosh Horizons and NetProfessional magazines and a stint as Book Reviewer of Science Fiction and Fantasy for Amazing Stories when it was owned by TSR. For a number of years I published an amateur magazine called OtherRealms.
I made a decision to focus on on my high tech career and put the writing on hold. My writing time now is primarily spent here on chuqui.com. I’m always looking at opportunities but right now, I’m not actively looking to get more involved in writing professionally again.
Fiction
In my writing, I really enjoyed exploring the boundaries between SF and Fantasy, and screwing around with that mythical “fourth wall” between the story and the reader. These are tough to do right, easy to do badly, and I’d like to think I more or less succeeded most of the time. I also tended to write off into left field — my first sold work, for the SF anthology Alternate Kennedys, was actually a horror story, not remotely SF. My favorite pieces involved a continuing character I was working with, a computer consultant who kept getting involved with fantastic beings (those are Good Intentions and Birds of a Feather) — that series was an attempt to write a hard-SF series about a subject that quickly becomes boring to many readers (stories about working with computers, as opposed to stories with computers in them as gilt and props) — but at the same time, involving purely fantastic and mythological beings.
I was never a prolific short fiction writer; my preferred length was the novel, of which I have two unfinished ones in the trunk somewhere…
Here’s a list of the fiction I’ve published. Where I can make it available online, I’ve done so and linked to it for your amusement.
- Death Do Us Part (Alternate Kennedys, Tor, July 1992, Mike Resnick, Editor). A horror/dark fantasy story involving Marilyn Monroe coming back as a succubus to make Jack Kennedy’s life interesting. (what’s left of it). This book is seriously out of print. [memo to self: need to publish this]
- Princess and the Dragon (Pulphouse Magazine, never published). This is your typical soft fantasy with a dragon, a kidnapped princess, and a worthy knight off to rescue here. Except it’s not, well, typical.
- Going Straight (co-written with Laurie Sefton, Further Adventures of the Batman, Featuring the Penguin, Bantam, 1992; edited by Martin Harry Greenberg; reprinted in other DC anthologies). The Batman story, the one I wrote in collaboration with Laurie, has it’s own strange story about its creation. We initially submitted an outline for the story to DC that caused mass horror among the editors (it involved the Penguin going back to a high school reunion to get even with all of his peers that made fun of him as a young boy, killing them off in nasty, gruesome and very melodramatic ways — when we had him chop the head off of the teacher-nun with a sharpened metal ruler, the DC people evidently lost it) — but we were given about 24 hours to come up with an alternate story, write and and submit it as an alternate — which was accepted without a single request for modification (go figure). Since we couldn’t kill the nun, we ripped off the church instead, having the Penguin use computer crime to embezzle all of the money from the arch-diocese (a Cardinal, to keep the bird theme alive). it is, we believe, the first time someone was murdered with a Macintosh to the skull…. Somewhere around here we have the original (rejected) outline, which is a real screamer. If I can find it, I’ll post it.
- Good Intentions (Deals with the Devil, Daw, 1993, edited by Mike Resnick). A computer consultant gets hired by God to hack Hell’s databases to save souls. Except it ain’t that easy. This was the first appearance of my computer consultant character who keeps getting hired by fantasy beings. The entire premise of the series was to write straight them as straight science fiction pieces, but with key characters that are pure fantasy — but written as if they’re real.
- Fnord and Gord go to the Zoo (Xanadu 3, edited by Jane Yolen, Tor Books, January 1995) A Fafhrd and Grey Mouser pastiche, sort of. This is a story where I not only blow up the fourth wall between author and audience, I dance the macarena on the remains — and invariably, people either love it for the humor or hate it for the humor — and in a few cases, both at the same time. Writing stories where the characters overtly know they’re characters and mug for the audience is exceptionally tough, and I think I pulled it off fairly well overall. Probably my favorite piece of published fiction.
- Birds of a Feather (WitchFantastic!, Daw books, January, 1995, edited by Mike Resnick and Martin Harry Greenberg). A Science Fiction story using Macintoshes in witchcraft. Co-stars Morgan the cockatoo in a supporting role. Another of my computer consultant stories.
- Downtime (never sold) It’s set in the same universe as Good Intentions and Birds of a Feather, only this time, it’s Christmas Eve, and Santa has a problem…. Personally, I find the prose in this a bit clunky, but I love the premise. I decided to stop actively writing before polishing it to my preferences.
Non-Fiction
I’ve done a fair amount of non-fiction writing over the years. Probably my most famous piece is A Primer on How to Work With the Usenet Community, the original guide to using and posting to USENET, written back in 1984, and still in use today with some modification, but it’s amazing how radically the net has changed, and how little that document has. There were a number of people who gave good advice and feedback on the drafts, but this document shows that good writing can really be timeless — and that the issues the net faces today aren’t new by any means. It has been adopted by literally thousands of organizations and translated into at least 20 languages before I stopped counting. It is in the public domain, so it’s free for anyone to use.
I did a regular technical column for the support newsletter back when I was working at Sun, for instance, and I administered the Nebula Awards for the Science Fiction Writers of America for many years, and wrote the Nebula Award newsletter for them. But I’ve had three significant public non-fiction gigs, which if you’re really lucky or crazy, you might run into.
First, a good number of years back, I was a contributing editor to a magazine called Macintosh Horizons. I wrote a monthly piece and reviews for a while (I don’t have the exact dates handy, since all my contracts and copies are in a box underneath a hundred other boxes) until the magazine died.
Second, OtherRealms helped me get a monthly column in Amazing Stories as a book reviewer when that publication was owned by TSR. That column, more than anything else, taught me just how much I hate having a monthly writing deadline (especially when you also have a real job) — there is no hell like being four days from deadline, 2000 words needed to write, no books read and everything in your in-box is either a Dragonlance(TM) clone, a Gor book, or the latest piece of tripe from Piers Anthony.
Finally, my memory of writing a monthly column finally faded enough that when XPlain took over NetProfessional magazine, I offered to write for them. They were silly enough to accept, so I wrote a regular column for them for a few issues. Unfortunately, I ran into severe time constraints, and after five issues, I had to resign the column.
I’ve always been a fan of SF and Fantasy, so it’s no surprise I’ve also been involved to some degree in Science Fiction Fandom, which, in many situations, has only peripheral to Science Fiction and Fantasy and is itself a hobby and a lifestyle. For a while I got very involved in the fanzine pubbing part of SF fandom, and even spent time as a member of FAPA (the Fantasy Amateur Press Association), one of the historic fanpub organizations. All of that fell by the wayside during various work crunches, and now I’m pretty seriously away from all of that — but to be honest, I miss it, but don’t have the time to go get involved again…
Contractually, none of my non-fiction publications can be posted, so you won’t find it here. Most of it is horribly dated and useless by now, anyway, so it’s no great loss, although the book reviews might be remotely interesting still.
OtherRealms
OtherRealms is a Science Fiction Fanzine I put out between 1986 and 1992. It was primarily focussed on reviews and criticism of Science Fiction and Fantasy, but also contained other material that I found interesting. Beyond my own writing, it contained the work of many others, some fans like I was at the time, others authors in the field who were looking for an outlet for informal pieces. Authors who were to be found in OtherRealms included Mike Resnick, Jack Chalker, Charles de Lint, Harry Turtledove, Melissa Scott, Kevin J. Anderson, Michael P. Kube-McDowell, and Lawrence Watt-Evans. I’m proud to admit that at the 1989 World SF convention in Boston (Noreascon Three), OtherRealms was nominated for a Hugo award for Best Fanzine, and I was nominated for Best Fan Writer. I’m even prouder to note that I finished ahead of No Award in both categories, even though there was a voting controversy which affected the Hugos that year.
32 issues have been published. 30 of them were available on the net, while 31 and 32 were paper only. OtherRealms grew out of a wish to find a better way to publish material on the net. You have to realize that back in 1986, things were plain text and distribution was by e-mail and USENET. Even then, USENET was showing signs of strain from growth and popularity, but none of us had a clue how good we had it at the time. USENET today is nothing but a shadow of what it was, quality-wise. A second reason for OtherRealms (other than thinking I had something useful to say) was that I was fighting a serious, nasty writer’s block, and I felt that putting myself on a writing schedule and forcing myself to write (or embarass myself in front of the readers waiting for each issue) would help me break out. It did, but it also took on a life of its own and became a much larger thing than anyone expected.
Of course, in today’s World Wide Web world, OtherRealms looks (and is) horribly primitive. But it was one attempt to find a better way to deliver and distribute information on-line, long before the WWW existed (or was even under consideration). I’ve considered bringing OtherRealms back at times (and when I shut it down, I had two more issues under development; one a standard OtherRealms, one a parody/honorarium issue about Mike Resnick called OtherRealms: The Alternate Resnicks. I still have all of the pending material in a box somewhere, but after all of this time, I expect it to never see the light of day (unless, god forbid, it becomes an English thesis some day long after my death….)
I still have (somewhere in my files) the original PageMaker documents for the printed versions of many of these issues. I’ve considered turning them int PDF’s and putting them online, but I haven’t had the time to do it, and I’d have to think long and hard about whether I legally have the copyright permissions to do so, or whether I’d have to track down the authors to grant permission. If I decide it’s the later, it’ll never happen. If not, it’ll simply probably never happen…
Please abide by the copyright notices in the issues — people’s lack of concern over copyright protection was one reason I removed them from the net. Don’t screw it up for others.
Visit the OtherRealms Archives.
Mailing List Archives
Before there was blogging, or blogs, or even web browsers, there was e-mail. And while lots of folks like to think the internet started when they created a blog, it was alive and well and busily discussing things long before blogs or social networking. For many years, we hosted mailing lists for many sports teams in both hockey and baseball. Those lists have been retired, but the archives live on. The largest and longest running of them was our Sharks list, which we ran from 1992 until 2005, and which is still going strong under new owners at Yahoo groups.
Some of the lists were large and vibrant, some were small and very much niches. Some did pretty well, some were experiments that never got critical mass. All of them are interesting glimpses into the intersection of the online universe and the sports world and the state of the sport at the time. It’s my long-term plan to make this content more searchable (this article is a first hint at Google to start indexing… hint hint) and do some research into the information and see what pops up.
And don’t forget; next time one of you sports bloggers wants to crow “I’ve been blogging since 2005!”, remember: some of us have been doing this since, well, before some of you were potty trained.
Enjoy.
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