Joseph Aniwaya, to quote Lex Luther in one of the Superman movies, is my "nomme de voyage." I like that better than pen name. Aniwaya is Tsalagi (Cherokee language) for "gray wolf man." If you saw me, you would understand. I work at a fairly grim job, two jobs, in fact, and my wife, who writes for this site, suggested that writing fan fic would be a great diversion from that. I try to set aside at least an hour every night to write. I spend a lot of time in hospitals with my wife, who is very gravely, possibly terminally, ill with a very rare genetic blood disorder, and there is a lot of time in between doctors' visits when I just can't look at another work-related report and have to do something else, so I write. Most things I don't inflict on others. I'm also a chronic insomniac and started doing a lot of writing while I am lying awake in the middle of the night.

My first attempt at publishing fan fic is with my favorite show, The Big Bang Theory. Once I realized that the adorable little girl on Northern Exposure (she played a character named Miranda, or Randi) would play Penny, I was addicted to TBBT even before they aired the first episode. (Google her name and "Northern Exposure," and you will find a clip of a precious 8-year-old Kaley playing Barbies with the character Shelly, who was extremely pregnant. At the time, I called in my wife and told her to look at this beautiful child who was a female version of our son.) Kaley is exactly 7 days younger than my son and looks exactly as he would if he were female. (I am slightly more than half Native-American, but my Irish great-grandmother had strawberry blonde hair. My wife, who could pass for Kaley's mother, is half-English and half-Scottish and is so white she almost glows. Our son has the right mixture of light-skinned blonde and the Cherokee bone structure that he is quite striking, as is Kaley, who, if I recall correctly, is mixed Italian and German.) I have always felt a father's pride in Kaley, almost as if she is my son's fraternal twin sister. I have followed her through 19 years of her 21-year career and find both Kaley and her character Penny absolutely fascinating. Penny, in fact, is the most intriguing character on TV right now, in my opinion, although I am quite dismayed at the depiction of her and Leonard the writers have chosen to pursue on the show.

I am working on several other stories, which I have been writing for several months but have not yet submitted--I haven't decided whether I want to do that to you. I have been working on a novel based on my grandmother's experiences as a Native American in the early 1900s, but that is not exactly fan fiction: I am looking for a publisher for it. I have a second novel in the works as well but have put that on hold until I can hone my writing a bit. It's humor, kind of the style of Janet Evanovich (I wish), and humor is tough. I published fiction for the first time many years ago, but I allowed my career to take a different path. I have published 14 nonfiction books through publishers including McGraw-Hill, and I have worked as an editorial consultant for several nonfiction book series, but I have not published fiction in a very long time. Maybe writing fan fiction will help me get back into that groove. A few years back, I did a mentorship under a prominent science fiction writer, who turned out to be both a hack and an ass, and stopped writing fiction for several years after a very miserable experience.

Thank you for taking the time to find out more about me. I hope you enjoy the stories, but I understand that this is a "sharpening the saw" activity for me, so I know this isn't exactly Steven King writing. Please let me know if there is anything in particular you would like to see. When my wife realized that I had written a number of chapters in the first story I submitted to blow off steam but did not intend to do anything with them, she bullied me into registering for an account and posting them. I'll have to admit I was skeptical, but I finally relented. I had no intention of inflicting them on others, but she thought it was important that I do. I ultimately deleted the first story I posted and deleted my account after some really unkind reactions to my first attempt. It took me about a year to try again.

Take care, and happy writing. I've become very fond of this community and want all of us to become the best writers we can be. I enjoy reading others' stories, although I sometimes fall behind.