"They pushed me out of the portal, dumped me into the sage and manzanita. The great orb’s pastel colors glowed against the clear night sky. As I backed away she rocked, then lifted into the air, the only sounds a scrape and rattle as dirt and pebbles rolled into the hollow she’d left. I saw the sparkle of distant flashbulbs from the perimeter of the landing site, like stars on waves. "I wondered if it was my fault the aliens had stolen my grandmother."
Author
Sean has led what he calls a stereotypical writer’s life. A freakishly precocious child raised in the San Francisco Bay Area hippy-era bohemian demi-monde by drunks, he was beaten and alienated in violent inner city schools. But his grandmother’s position as head children’s librarian gave him full and unlimited access to the full collection of the Richmond Public Library, including atrocity and sex-education photos, from the age of five on. Compulsively creative from the beginning, he didn’t receive any artistic training until his mid-twenties, when he studied classical draftsmanship under Maurice Lapp. Since then, he’s been a student of everything from botanical illustration to storyboarding to bass guitar. A manual labourer since age thirteen, in his late thirties a back injury took him out of the work force. Since then, he’s been creatively productive in forms and media ranging from animation scripts to performance to gallery art, and this work has appeared everywhere from underground magazines to paleontological databases to the BBC. He lives in Berkeley, California with his beloved spouse and dogs, in a neighbourhood the news used to refer to as ‘Homicide Central.’ A friend once said, “Sean puts off all these tough guy vibes but he’s really a big marshmallow who just wants people to like each other and be polite.” Well, it’s hard to argue. That’s pretty much how it is.
