George Ford Smith was born in Buffalo, NY in 1943 and has worked with computers for much of his adult life. As a computer programmer from the late '60s to the mid-'80s, he wrote Fortran programs for transonic wind tunnel tests, authored a program simulator in mainframe assembler for the prototype phase of the Safeguard ABM Project, and developed a popular shareware library for the IBM PC called "Boosters for Turbo Pascal Programmers." Snippets of his Boosters 8088 assembler code were published in Dr. Dobb's Journal and other trade publications.

Smith began experimenting with scriptwriting in the mid-'70s, mostly for the amusement of colleagues, then undertook it seriously when he began his writing career fulltime in 1999. In addition to movie scripts and a short story based on a turtle he rescued from his pool's skimmer, he has written articles on economics, history, and politics for libertarian websites such as Strike-the-Root.com and Mises.org. His formal education, which went as far as graduate work in psychology at the University of Buffalo, is largely irrelevant to anything that matters.

In pursuit of less-frigid experiences, Smith left Buffalo in 1979, having accepted a position in computer security with Atlanta-based Southern Company. Within three years he got divorced, remarried, and had twin baby girls. In the afterword of his novel, "The Flight of the Barbarous Relic," he tells the following story:

"When I moved from Buffalo to Atlanta in 1979 and began work for an electric utility, I knew someday I would leave and attempt a writing career. A few weeks into my job I came across a newspaper headline that consisted of the song title, "Gonna Fly Now!" I have long since forgotten the accompanying story, if I even bothered to read it. I cut the headline out and taped it to the inside top of my office trash basket as a reminder. People sometimes lose sight of their goals. I didn't want that to happen to me.

"As the years passed, I took the waste basket with me whenever I switched departments or moved to a different building. A thing of beauty it isn't. It's a black clunker, not the least stylish, but it was the most important part of my office baggage.

"On a July morning in 1999, as I was leaving downtown headquarters for the last time and about to begin my new career, I had the basket in my arms as I was passing the guard's station in the lobby. It was filled with personal items - pictures of my kids, mostly - as if I were moving to a new office within the company. But the guard knew I was on my way out for keeps and asked me if I was stealing company property. I said, yes, I was. We both laughed, and I continued on out the door.

"As I type these words now the trash basket sits on the floor of my home office, the Rocky theme song title untouched after 29 years.

"Yes, the writer is a thief. But maybe he can be forgiven."