Author: Author John G Dyer

Born in Chickamauga, Georgia, John Dyer moved to Asia in 1956, when his father took an engineering assignment with a power utility. He attended grades 1-12 at an international school, touring with his family through 29 countries before settling in the Midwest. A computer scientist turned author of fiction, he is a founder of an IBM-affiliated software company, and an early innovator in electronic commerce. He brings a lifelong interest in science and engineering to everything he writes.

An alternative to Goodreads

Are you looking for something worth reading — and if so, did you fall for the headline, the featured image, perform a keyword search, scroll and stop? Whichever, this is a rare moment, even rarer if you’re here on account of having read one of my novels.

Which is unlikely. According to The 10 Awful Truths about Book Publishing, 2021 saw 3 million titles published in the United States. That’s a lot of blurbs to plow through for the sake of a quiet evening with a Kindle in your lap. If you’re reading this (you are), I’m grateful.

And I will not abuse the privilege — the payoff is right here. Click image to follow the link.

Shepherd is not a publisher’s site, nor book blog, nor book review aggregator (per se). Here you will find, among other enticements, essays by authors, sharing what’s on their reading lists, and why.

That’s a clever angle. Authors may be counted upon to have streetwise standards for literature. The potential, especially for a reader looking to change up the bookshelf, cannot be overstated.

I have an essay scheduled for January 13. Look for it.

In the meantime, try the site. Please tell us what you think in the comments.

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Folksy!

Back in 1928, off-planet operators were still booking lemur folk into the historic Wild West for steak dinners and trail rides, but the proposition was on shaky ground.

America’s first interstate highway had been routed straight through the Dakotas. The Lazy L Ranch, 20 miles north of Black Rock, was not as discreet a place to land spacecraft as it used to be.

Continue reading “Folksy!” →
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Camera Familia — Chapter 2

In 1955, Mom began dating Alan Maury Razovsky — a second-generation immigrant Lithuanian Jew, born 1914 in St. Louis MO, more recently from Dallas, Texas, an electrical engineer at TVA where Mom worked.

** Flashback ** There were twelve Jews at UTexas Austin in 1935, where AMR got his engineering degree.

One of them ended up working in the New York City financial district — World Bank, or maybe Agency for International Development.

Continue reading “Camera Familia — Chapter 2” →
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Camera Familia — Chapter 1

Signalman Benjamin Franklin Dyer, United States Navy, the South Pacific, circa 1944.

I have Frank Dyer’s semaphore flag, his father’s shotgun, a war trophy Japanese rifle, an engineering handbook printed in 1934.

But I never knew my natural father. He died in July 1950 when I was five months old, heart stopped by a stray current traveling between an electric stove and a washing machine, in our kitchen on Mountain View Circle in Flintstone Georgia, far from the battlefield.

Continue reading “Camera Familia — Chapter 1” →
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Preview!

A wave of Italian emigration to Mexico in the late 1800s had left its mark on the village, particularly at the center. The church and courthouse, on opposite sides of the square, were Spanish. Everything else was Italianate except the band shelter — aluminum poles, sandbags, nylon ripstop roof, circa big-box warehouse store.

The sun descended below mountaintops, throwing shadows into valleys. Streetlamps blinked on. Shops lit signs. The town square came alive with hanging lights and illuminated fountains.

A gypsy jazz band from Hungary filed onstage; guitar, upright bass, clarinet, and a gym-bag percussionist equipped with snare drum, high-hat, washboard, block and cowbell.

Continue reading “Preview!” →
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The roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd

One thing you can always count on seeing in a Sci-Fi action show is flying objects. Architecture is no exception, and why would it be? The day after anti-gravity is developed, somebody will start building a flying house.

I built my first one in The Illusion of Gravity. According to the story’s hero Rivan Saraf, “The only large shapes Iron Arrow could form in those days were cylinders and spheres. So that’s what you got when you ordered a flying house — a flattened tube fused to a flattened sphere.”

Continue reading “The roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd” →
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📝 Manuscript Assessment Criteria ☑️

Notes and Treats As a printable tabulated form or checklist, the Manuscript Assessment Criteria presented by SoundEagle🦅 below can assist writers in evaluating and inspecting their own works (either by themselves or with a group of readers) before submitting their manuscripts to publishers, and also during successive edits after the previous submission(s) and before the […]

📝 Manuscript Assessment Criteria ☑️

Reblogged from SoundEagle. Insightful!

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