Well, Smashwords, through which I am publishing my ebooks, says an author should tell her or his readers a bit about themselves, to encourage a sense of 'knowing the author', and thus also encouraging the readers to buy more books. A fair enough idea, I guess, so here's a bit.

The most important part, I guess, at least to me, what I would want anyone to know or consider about what I am doing with my life these days, is *why* I am doing most of my current writing, which is Green Island, Serpent's Tale, and the non-fiction Democratic Revolution Handbook and various related essays and collection-type things I'll probably move from their web versions into EPUB form in the coming months, which can be now accessed through my 'main page', the View from Green Island . It's on a bit of a hiatus now, but I will be getting back at it soon, and it does have links to most of my writing from the last few years, one way or another.

I am writing, and have been for many years, because I think our world and country (I'm Canadian) are in very serious danger, and have been for quite a few years now, since the 80s. Although quite a few people understand this danger and are trying to do something about it, it appears that a very large number of people in Canada don't really have much idea of what is really happening, and I am trying to get them more aware, so we/they can start fighting together more effectively to 'save our country and world' - and that's not hyperbole, I think we are heading for some very bad places if we don't stop the current path our very undemocratic leaders are forcing us all down in the pursuit of the kind of world those who rule us want, but few people would actually support if they had a better idea of what is happening. And even most of the people who are aware we have some problems don't seem to understand the reality they/we are fighting, the depth or true nature of the problems, and so are fighting very ineffectively - we've been going pretty steadily downhill for the last 30-odd years, regressing badly in almost every important 'social indicator' way since the 1970s, and it's not accidental, there are 'bad people' doing bad things in their interests, and they're going to take us to a very, very bad place if we don't start offering some far more effective resistance than we have been the last 30-odd years. I won't get into a lot of detail here, that's not what this short 'bio page' is for - but I've spent the last few years working on a book in which all of this laid out for anyone interested in a great deal of detail, and I finally finished earlier this year and is on line here - Democratic Revolution Handbook . (I'm going to be seeing about making an ebook out of this, but there are a lot of links and graphic-type stuff, and I'm not sure how well it's going to work as an ebook, as it's not made for ebook readers, but for web-connected computers).

Green Island is an earlier effort, finished around 2008, but never published by a 'big publisher' with distribution and marketing ability - I did a 'POD' version myself, which I was and am very happy with, both in content and design, still available at Lulu or Amazon through the Green Island web page. I can't really do an 'epub' version of the Green Island poster I put together last year, but I think that's pretty great too - you can get a look here - GREAT Green Island Poster 2015 - if you're interested.) The idea of Green Island was to imagine a society which would be what I think a lot of us would like to live in, a peaceful and fair place, as opposed to the dog-eat-dog pretend-democracy capitalist society of violence and inequality we currently inhabit. Green Island was/is also kind of a 'social democracy' answer to Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and other books, which glorify capitalism (very, very falsely in my opinion, as explained at some length in the Democratic Revolution Handbook) and presents 'socialists' as a bunch of whining, cowardly, idea-less, lazy moochers, which is what the capitalist rightwingers have convinced a lot of people to believe over the last 2-3 decades and continue to regularly trumpet through the mainstream media, again very, very falsely, I think. I'd been thinking for a long time we on the 'true left' needed some kind of fictional response to Rand's capitalist-glorifying (and socialist demonizing) lies, a positive vision for the rest of us to strive towards, with some exploration of how we got here, all wrapped up in a compelling story, and finally got around to writing it. It's a big book, and took a lot of time, but I am very pleased with what I have created here.

A bit about where I came from:

I've always been a 'writer', starting with writing songs in my teen years and into my 20s and even a couple of good ones in my 40s after I'd moved on to other things, some pretty good ones, although again never picked up by any publishers so never going anywhere - I haven't got them 'on line' yet, but hope to one of these days. (actually, there's one of my songs 'on line' I just learned awhile back, one called Sweet Sister Mary, performed by John McDermott, here , arranged by an extremely talented guy I used to write with, way back in the day. I have lots more good ones (including a few written with the extremely talented guy) if anyone is interested get in touch. I'm a writer, and seem to have no talent for promotion.)

I've always been inclined to organise my thoughts and express myself through the written word, the first thing I remember is a 'protest essay' I wrote when I was in Grade 12 or so in high school called 'Situation Requiring Propitiation'; I have no idea what the situation was now, but I do recall being pleased with the essay. The principal, as I recall, was less impressed, which seems to be the pattern of my writing life, or life in general for that matter, nobody in authority wants to hear me whining about what they are doing wrong. But here I am 50 years later, still whining about what they are doing wrong. In Canada the last 3 decades especially, there's been no shortage of material. The rest of the world too, but if I am going to be any kind of 'change agent', it's going to be in Canada, the home country I once was so proud of, which has fallen on very hard times, and I am loathe to leave it to the minions of Mordor who have taken it over and seem hell-bent on completely destroying all that once was good about it (and our world of course), so keep writing. If we can take Canada for Democracy, it can be a beacon and path for other countries to follow, maybe.

I started my 'fiction' writing career, such as it has ever been, back around 1990, when one of my brothers was doing some summer work at a publishing company in Halifax, and sent me a notice of a call for children's book manuscripts; I wrote a book called Ernie Mows the Lawn in a week or so and sent it off, and they accepted it - but with a 'small' change. The all-female editing crew thought there were too many books about 'little boys' and not enough about 'little girls' so they wanted Ernie to do one of the original transgender things and become Kelly, and I agreed, just reasoning that it was better to have Kelly published than Ernie sitting in a drawer, although I always felt a bit guilty about it, and eventually gave Ernie his own book, Ernie Does Science, which was never, again, 'officially' published, but is now available with my other 'kids' books' through Dave's Smashwords EPUB page. (I really, really like the Smashwords philosophy, that readers should be allowed to judge whether a writer's books are worth reading, rather than some small group of gatekeepers.) That was followed by another 'young readers' book called Adventure in the Night Sky, which was my last with them, as they edited it so heavily it hardly seemed like my writing at all, they seemed to take 'my voice' and turn it into 'their generic' kind of voice, which really pissed me off, and I let them know it (they did all this 'editing' without my input or permission, the first I knew of it was when I got my copy of the published book). Seems I've ended a lot of jobs by disagreeing with some kind of 'authority'. And finally, I finished off a book I'd had an idea for for awhile in 2007, called Aquila, again no publishers interested, but I did a POD with Lulu, partly to get familiar with the POD process in preparation for Green Island, which I'd also been sending to *all* literary agents and publishers in Canada, to no interest whatsoever. {My Dave Patterson - Books for Young Readers page.)

To go back to where I was before I got sidetracked (a common habit of mine, lots to get sidetracked about after 66 years of paying attention ...), around this time, the early 90s, I was getting the idea for Green Island, the story of a place where we actually had an 'of, by and for the people' kind of democracy, rather than the pretend democracy we have had since the 80s, and did some work on it, but as with everyone, any number of things were going on in my life during these years, and then in 1993 my father died, which was a massive blow, and in 1994 I came to Thailand, to get away from any number of things, and in a more positive sense, to see what the world was like outside of Canada - I've written a kind of short bio here, From Hastings to Green Island, a somewhat abridged story of some 'highlights' of my life aside from the above, if you're interested.

Currently I still live and work in Thailand, teaching English to 1st-year doctors and editing medical papers for submission to medical journals, which is an ok job for me, if you have to have a job, which we do - I found the work situation in Canada to be pretty grim, there are a lot of people no doubt happy with their work, but there are a lot of others not happy, and I was always one of the latter, not fitting in well at all to the 8-hours per day 5-days per week routine of doing drudge work that is the lot of many in our capitalist profit-oriented society. I'm fully supportive (now, if less so when I was younger and less understanding of what the world works like) of all of us having to work, to contribute to our community and the support of our quite advanced modern world, but we should also all have the opportunity to work at something we like and find rewarding, rather than having to choose some kind of least-of-evils in the great capitalist assembly line to keep our rulers wealthy or starve. Much more about this in Green Island, and other places.

Future - well, the hope is this, that Green Island will start to sell as I think it deserves to now it is available through EPUB, and make me some money, and I will be able to undertake some kind of Great Green Island Road Show and Democracy Chatauqua, taking the message of the Democratic Revolution Handbook across Canada, trying to organise people into an effective resistance of some kind of the NWO takeover that has been ongoing in Canada the last 30 years, turning us into a modern kind of feudal society, with a small handful of immensely powerful and wealthy 'owners' of the country, and a great herd of basically powerless, ignorant peasants doing the slave work that keeps them wealthy. We all need a dream to keep going, that's pretty much mine. If you agree with the general message of the Democratic Revolution Handbook , your help would be more than welcome - get in touch, or just get to work yourself, that's what 'democracy' means - we do it ourselves, we don't wait for someone to give us a nice present some day.

I don't really have the time to create and maintain the kind of website that would allow ongoing interaction with any kind of 'fan base', and being a 'celebrity writer' is not what I am all about anyway - I would like to start organising around the ideas in the DRH, and if you want to get in touch about things related to this, you can email me here, and we'll see what develops - I'm working on this now, and will update here when anything happens.

For now, I guess thanks for your interest, and let's start working together to make this a better world.

Final pic - me in my favorite place, snorkeling over a coral reef in the Andaman Sea, which I've done a lot of the last few years, they are so beautiful. But now with a note of extreme worry, June 2016 - I was out to a couple of my favorite reefs in early June, and one is almost all bleached and the other over half bleached. From what I've read, there's a small chance they can recover, if the algae return soon, but it seems like a small hope. I'll check again in a few weeks and see what's happened - but if they're dead, it will be just devastating.