I am the Internet’s original stunt writer. I’ve authored more than 100 books in six commercial genres including science fiction, fantasy, romance, gamelit and comedy. I have penned more than 1300 articles for clients including the Fortune Five, major international corporations, technology leaders and executives. Among my titles is a #1 Amazon best-seller, a #1 Amazon new release, a top ten comic and a top 1500 novel. I have readers in sixteen countries.
I have either developed or produced more than 40 video games on platforms ranging from Flash to PC to mobile devices and consoles. I was stubborn enough to build my own cloud reading application when e-readers came up short. I run one of the largest and most successful independent animation studios in the business. When it comes to Internet marketing, I am the quintessential Bilbo Swaggins.
My parents were both award winning television and newspaper journalists. My father was an investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times, while my mother worked for CBS News in Denver and the Independent Press Telegram in Long Beach. It isn’t surprising I ended up a writer. Between us, my parents and I have four college degrees, all related to writing or journalism. I broke my first statewide story in 10th grade and graduated from the California State University with a degree in English Education. I am a major advocate for literacy and I believe there’s never been a better time in human history to be an author and journalist.
The Committee
As all of you know, if an Irishman isn’t out starting fights, he’s hunched over a bottle desk at home writing heroic verse about them, so don’t be surprised if you find editorial here and there about technology, education, politics, the entertainment industry, video games or various other topics. While doing battle with the Committee, I will frequently publish opinion pieces and works of journalism. I also write useful instructional articles from time to time to help my fellow writers and web developers achieve greater success. You may even find a tech article or two here and there. Why, if you’re so inclined (or sufficiently inebriated) you might even want to hire me.
I take the privilege of publishing to the world seriously. I use WordPress, but I don’t tolerate stupidity on my sites. I don’t cram my pages full of gew gaws, blinking pop-up buttons and nonsense. I don’t do ads, autoplay videos or proprietary formats, and my site won’t make your phone hang for 12 minutes while it downloads 68,000 Javascripts that don’t work.
When you need a break from that kind of noise, come visit the Committee and my other sites. Here you can read in peace. Same goes for my books and games. They aren’t stuffed full of broken formatting, misspelled words and off-center graphics that don’t fit the screen. My EPUBs validate. My code compiles. It’s all about the fundamentals here. We keep it nice and simple.
No Social Media
I used to post on social media. But I got tired of decorating someone else’s web site for free, so I don’t take social media seriously any more. I don’t have Google spyware on my site any more either. In fact, Google is blocked from my web sites. I’ve been on the web longer than Google or social media. I was here first. There won’t be any links to social media here either. I have several web sites, a bookstore and my own animation studio. I need social media like Custer needed more Indians.
Shane on the Web
The Spartan design of my site isn’t an accident. I developed and published one of the first 16,000 sites on the web. (Live in ’95!). My first site pre-dates Match.com, Craigslist, Amazon, MSNBC, Wikipedia. the Wayback Machine, Hotmail and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Linux
It is here I need to point out my career-defining relationship with Linux. I’ve used this operating system now for more than 29 years. My first install was Slackware 3.0 off a boot floppy. I’ve used Linux as a primary workstation ever since. As many will tell you I have a less-than-optimal opinion of Windows.
All of my professional software development work, all the software tools I’ve written and all of my novels have been written on Linux. I’ve been using the Emacs text editor now for just over ten years and I am still surprised regularly at how much I still have to learn. Every one of my web sites runs on a Linux or UNIX variant. I consider Linux to be one of the greatest achievements of the human race. It is without doubt the heroic epic of the Internet age.
I launched my first web site through a Winsock application on Windows 3.1, and I’ve had at least one live site on the web continuously since March of 1995.
The World’s First Browser-Based Video Game
My first commercial product was a shareware application called Hyperpage, which was a specialized document editor for HTML that pre-dated Macromedia’s Dreamweaver by two years. I used it to research and develop a markup language for games called GML in 1997. GML was the key technology in my first game engine (Tranquility 1.0), which led to the development of my first retail game and the first commercial browser-based RPG LadyStar: Reflections in a Dream in 1998, featuring a Javascript-powered inventory engine and full-screen animated graphics. I developed and tested my first game engine on Mozilla 0.8 only weeks after Netscape open-sourced its Navigator browser. I can’t be certain, but I may have developed the world’s first fully browser-based commercial video game.
My new web-based cloud reading application Bitbook, which went live in 2020, is running on software descended from the original Tranquility engine from some 25 years ago.
Show Business
As a result of my attempts to license the Sailor Moon® characters in 1999, I became a marketing consultant for DIC Entertainment working for two-time Emmy® Award winning producer Andy Heyward, who I later interviewed for my book The Incredible Untold Story of Sailor Moon.
Not long after, my career shifted to comics and publishing with my first print title LadyStar: Relic of Battle in 2003, my first Flash-based game in 2006 and my first webcomic LadyStar: Fury of the Venom Legion in 2008. I established a webcomic network that grew to more than 115 sites and more than 70,000 readers a day the same year. My LadyStar comics were our flagship titles and helped myself and my artists build an audience of more than 250,000 readers. LadyStar: Jessica Hoshi and the Ajan Warriors went on to become my best-selling book for almost two years. It also reached #7 on Amazon.
Cold Beverage Studios
In 2011, I put together the team that would eventually become the largest and most successful animation studio in the independent game industry. We’ve had a bullpen of as many as 40 artists on four continents, delivered 1600+ projects to clients and produced more than 40 commercial game and comic titles for clients, some with critical acclaim. My team’s largest project delivered more than 3000 production-quality original color illustrations to a single client in less than 11 months.
Publishing
My debut military science fiction novel Strike Battleship Argent was published in 2016 and went on to reach the top 1500 on Amazon. It has been my bestselling book for more than six years. One of my recent novellas Let None Return Alive was a #1 New Release. The first edition of my gamelit novel Devils Demons and Dead Men was a #1 bestseller. I made all of my titles exclusive to my own bookstore in the summer of 2022.
My companies and I together own more than 15,000 copyrights and more than 35 trademarks in industries ranging from interactive to apparel to publishing. I publish and maintain an intellectual property portfolio on my network of web sites.
My current projects are the Starships at War military science fiction series featuring the adventures of Captain Jason Hunter and the Bandit Jacks, the all new Ironjammers fantasy series featuring the adventures of Chance Holiday, Jessica Halloran and their team of heroic adventurers, and the Kings and Conquests series, featuring the virtual adventures of Jordan Hall and the No-Name Games Guild. I’m developing a new course for authors and entrepreneurs called Million Dollar Artist™.
My ninth full-length novel Jacks Full of Aces was released on October 20th, 2020.