All my current writing projects are current available for free on Wattpad.  In addition to my fiction work listed below, I am gathering together at Wattpad’s request a set of some of my better writing on technology–humorous, serious, incisive, ridiculous, and otherwise.  Take a look:

• A Study with Slugs: It is the early 1980s, and women are disappearing from the university campus in Santa Cruz, California, home of the Fighting Banana Slugs. The local police and state investigators are baffled, and so solving these crimes is left to a dope-smoking, recorder-playing surfer who lives in a large house overlooking Monterey bay and his friend and roommate, an invalided-out former Marine who is now a student himself. Follow Zack, their 10 housemates, and a wide cast of characters that includes some of their nearly dozen housemates as Toshihiro Watterson uses his unique powers of observation and deduction to notice clues everyone else misses and solve the crimes in my first novel.
• “The Red-head Experiment”:  Once again Toshihiro Watterson, assisted by his roommate, former Marine Zack Gordon, is asked to solve a strange mystery that has others in early 1980s Santa Cruz, California stumped. Following along with Zack as he helps Tosh solve the strange mystery of the seemingly-silly Red-Head Experiment.
• “The Codex”:  In an increasingly dangerous and terror-ridden world, protecting the President of the U.S. calls for deploying the best leading-edge technology. Nothing less will do to guard the Leader of the Free World. But sometimes new technology has some unexpected consequences . . .
• “Death Comes Calling”:  You probably engaged in this thought experiment, especially if you’re a nerdy, comic book-reading guy: If I could have any power or ability, what would it be, and how would I use it? Would you use your super strength for Truth, Justice, and the American Way? Would your super-speed be employed battling villains? Or would you perhaps decide to render judgement and justice in your own, idiosyncratic way, as the protagonist in this story does?
• Technobabble:  During the filming of “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, there would frequently come times when the story called for the characters (and in the early days, it was often that bane of Trekkies everywhere, Wesley Crusher, the Platonic Ideal of Dork) to fix some far-future technical problem. Which means said characters had to employ far-future tech. Which by definition hasn’t been invented yet. What happened over the course of the series was that they engaged a couple of people to be in charge of continuity and technology, and the script writers would insert into the scripts, “[technobabble here]”, leaving the staff TechGeek to insert the proper futuristic-sounding tech gibberish. You know: Stuff that sounds realistically scientific, but is really just verbal handwaving. “Tachyon fields”; “Inertial dampers”; and so on. Welcome to my non-fictional, non-Star Trek, highly-idiosyncratic take on tech, tech-related topics, and sometimes random stuff that’s just obliquely related to tech that was triggered by me reading or hearing or seeing something that happened to drift through the wide-open transom of my brain and get stuck there. Some of the items you will see here are funny, some I hope are thought-provoking, some could probably be filed under the hashtag of #DougRant, filtered through what my life-partner calls my “weird perspective”. If you enjoy reading them, then they will have served their purpose. So read on and, hopefully, enjoy!