How does my background help in my writing?

Yes but only if I write about stuff I know about. Hold it! I write science fiction and fantasy how could I know about it, it hasn’t happened?

Well, I know about science and engineering. I was in the Navy for a long time so I got to know sailors and the military lifestyle and the general way the military/government approaches things. I have been a World Master for 36 or so years. And I read voraciously. Thus I think about it a great deal. In my day job I design engineering processes for designing aerospace stuff. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about how you would think about thinking about things. We call that third order thinking.

It allows me to be able to extrapolate rules about how things should work or at least I hope it does.

So when I say I write about things I know about, I mean I write science fiction because I know today’s science and extrapolate how the future would work. I worked for the Office of Naval Research for 11 years and I got to know how one would plan future breakthroughs.

I was a sailor for 23 years so I think future sailors would be very similar, not counting the hardware, to today’s sailors. Biology tells us that it takes an organism about 36,000 years to evolve naturally to the next stage. So I think humans will be pretty close to what we have today, even 5000 years in the future, once again, not counting the techno toys. I define human pretty broadly too.

Writing the fantasy part is a little looser. I believe in establishing a plausible reality as the frame work you create within. Even wildly chaotic fantasy has to have some rules of action or we the human readers won’t understand it. So my job as a process creator has allowed me to structure a reality that I feel works but is flexible enough to allow some really wild stuff to happen.