Who is “Rich The Writer Guy”
& where did he come up with that name?
That’s a good question and it has a simple answer – I am a writer.
Okay, maybe that doesn’t cover it completely so let me give you a bit of a bio: how I came to be a writer, my background and education and so on.
I wrote my first book in the 4th grade as part of the Talented and Gifted Program at Daniel Webster Elementary School in Dallas, Texas. Looking back, it wasn’t much of a book but for a fourth grader, it was a door opening into a world of exploration of ideas. The book, The Wild World of Sharks would probably only amount to a few pages of typewritten copy today but then, it was an in depth study of the various types of sharks, etc.
My next writing effort came a year later in the 5th grade when I wrote an essay about the peregrine falcon. In 7th grade, I wrote my first “research paper” about submarines. I still remember the excitement of digging through encyclopedias and books, routing out the information, writing it down on notecards and finally using those notecards to write my research paper.
In high school biology, I wrote another major research paper on cloning. This time, I went beyond simple research and reporting and wrote what could be called a white paper on the true ethics of cloning human beings. This was in the late 1980’s when cloning was, for most folks, a purely science fiction horror.
Through college and beyond, I found that researching a topic and writing about it allowed me to be like the great explorers of the 19th and 20th centuries – men like Dr. Livingston exploring the unknown interior of Africa. Maybe most of the map had been filled in by the time I came along, but research and writing allowed me to seek out new areas of exploration and create my own maps through my writing.
So where did this curiosity come from? Where did this wanderlust and desire to emulate the great explorers come from? Again, a deceptively simple answer: I was born and grew up in Kenya, a nation the size of Texas on the east coast of Africa.
My parents and grandparents were missionaries and explorers, themselves. We constantly explored places like the Great Rift Valley, the numerous game preserves and great expanses of nature. We also were in the midst of some of the most varied cultural centers in the world. In Kenya alone, there were nearly 40 independent languages spoken by the various people who called it home.
And so on ...
This bio page will expand as soon as I finish writing the rest of it!