Jim Burrows aka JimB. aka Brons
What can I say? I’m a nerd who loves computers, science, science fiction, fantasy, comic books, role-playing games, story telling and world building. I’m also a retired engineer with four decades of doing things I never did before with computers, software, networks, and telecommunications. I created my first comic book characters at 12, wrote my first fantasy story at 17, built a random solar system generator at 18 and created my first fantasy and science fiction role-playing game world at 25. I’m a master of things that don’t physically exist.
Before I retired, writing was just a hobby. I wrote stories for myself, my family and my collaborators. I built worlds for those stories and for the role-playing games I created. I helped authors visualize the worlds they had created. I pitched a TV show to a producer because I found myself walking the beach with him and loved the idea of turning the life of a real-world sword-wielding, cross-dressing, bisexual opera star who had operas written for her and twice fought a duel with three men at once into a modern-day TV show.
Since I retired, I’ve started getting serious about my hobbies, especially writing. I’ve got a handful of books started, though for a while now, I’ve set the rest aside in order to concentrate on the one that went over best with my writing group and test audiences. You can read about that one on my Aunt Jenny and the Delayed Quest page.
I still find time to walk at least 2.5 to 5 miles a day, every day, rain or shine, and periodically binge on genealogy and my other hobbies, but writing and the world-building that supports it are my main passions. That and Tai Chi, and my family, watching too much TV (F&SF and comic book stuff), and walking to the movie theater a mile from the house when there’s a good genre movie showing. Retirement’s a bigger job than I thought it was.
Back in school, at Hiram College, I was a Philosophy major. Just before I retired, I took a sabbatical in order to study Machine Ethics, a field that I expected to become really crucial within a few years. It looks like I was right about that. Ethics and automation and AI are everywhere these days. I wrote a lot on the topic at Medium.com, and I have a web site for that work including my sabbatical report and some thoughts on Artificial Intelligence and what Aristotle called “the common sense”.