Let’s step into the Wayback Machine, shall we?

The photo below, taken at South Shore High School by pal Barry Chaiken, shows me a few months before my 18th birthday, just as I was about to head off to SUNY Buffalo. It had been scheduled to appear in our high-school yearbook along with other casual student photos until (of this I am convinced, do not attempt to dissuade me) I refused to make an edit our faculty advisor requested to one of my poems.

I’d already been writing for years, and had by then been rejected from F&SF, Analog, and all of the other fine (and not so fine) magazines of the day, many of which no longer exist. Marvel Comics, my wife, Clarion, my son, Science Fiction Age, and the Syfy Channel (along with so many other things) were all waiting for me in the future, hiding around a bend where I could not see them.

Who knows what else waits just out of sight on the winding road ahead?