Far More Than You Would Ever Want to Know
about
Daniel Myers ...
"Three
minutes old, but it was
hard work,
certainly it must be
Happy Hour by
now."
If Dan tells you he was born in a log cabin in the Klondike, the
son of a prospector and a fair-haired barmaid of questionable virtue,
don’t believe him - sometimes he has trouble distinguishing
between fact and fiction. More likely, he was born in suburban
Chicago sometime between the first Sputnik launch and the moon
landing to a salesman and an absolutely heroic housewife who raised
a brood of seven without once turning to drink. When he was still
young, the family moved to Southern California and he grew up among
the orange groves and farmland that are now completely paved over
with concrete but bear names of former orange groves and farmland.
Always overly curious by nature, Dan took on the establishment
early when he publicly questioned just how the heck "duck
and cover" was supposed to save us from a nuclear strike.
It was only the first but certainly not the last time he would
become familiar with the concept of "detention." He has
yet to learn to keep his mouth shut and detention is still not
out of the question.
"Focused on final approach"
Being of a restless nature, he struck out on his own early. By
age 16 he and his dog were traveling America coast to coast. By
his late teen-age years, he had resettled in Northern California,
and Sonoma County and the Russian River became his new stomping
grounds. He is now politely referred to as being "well-traveled" -
a euphemism meaning “he cannot remember” all the places
he's been, but he's been to heaven a time or two and hell at least
as many. He was eyewitness to the Chinese staging a revolution
in Tiananmen Square in 1989 (not his fault) and traveled the width
of Russia as Gorbachev's Soviet Union crumbled (mostly not
his fault).
Still a teenager, Dan discovered his first and true love: flying.
He learned the craft from a series of old men, some who had fought
in World War II and even one who had been a barnstormer in the
1920s. This ultimately led to his work as a pilot and flight instructor.
In the 1980s he was offered a job as an air traffic controller
in United States, where he worked for 5 years, but restlessness
took hold again and when given the chance to work in New Zealand
- and being a keen tramper and river rafter - he jumped at the
opportunity. It turned into a lifelong love of the country. He
became a New Zealand citizen in 1990 and now divides his time between
the two countries.
Taking a sabbatical from air traffic control in 1996, he entered
the world of academia and now has enough parchment to wallpaper
his laundry room. Research for his first novel, the critically
acclaimed alternate history satire The Second Favorite Son, led
him to the University of South Carolina for a few years. There,
he taught American Literature and Creative Writing, and was on
the university president’s writing staff writing speeches
and jokes for the unfunniest man alive. In 2000 he returned to
New Zealand to work at Massey University in their School of Aviation
and as an English teacher in China.
In 2004 Dan returned to the USA and to air traffic control, and today
is a control tower manager, an avid pilot and occasional flight instructor.
He is also the managing director of AE
Link Publications, Inc, which publishes
Aviation-English
training material.
Aside from two novels and numerous articles, Dan published his
acclaimed short story The Bridge in The Class Menagerie in 1998. |
|
Second Favorite Son
Corporate Blue 
