As a small boy, the first novels I ever recall reading were the many works by Edgar Rice Burroughs, especially his series set on Mars, Venus and Pellucidar. As I grew older, I remained a voracious reader of just about every genre but I always retained a special affinity for stories about dragons. Whether the dragon was an evil ravening beast like Smaug or those wonderful partners on Pern, I found dragons were most often portrayed as more driven by nature than by their minds. Æthereal was born from the premise "What if the dragons were smarter than we were. How would our two species interact?" After spending 24 years traveling the world for the Air Force, I retired to South Carolina and presently work as an IS Regional Infrastructure Support Manager for a Fortune 500 company, covering from Florida to New Jersey, plus Wisconsin and Minnesota. I have six children, thirteen grandchildren and step-grandchildren, three dogs, and a library of over 1,500 books of almost every genre.