Our Volunteer of the Month for October is Dennis Stacy, one of the columnists for the PC Alamode.  That’s a little different, but think about it: you read this magazine every month, you probably have chosen the columnist(s) you think most interesting, and you always check out their columns first.  I do that myself, and you and I both learn something from those columns, or get a chuckle, or find out about upcoming events, or find out about the latest cybermystery.  So you columnists take heart: members do in fact read your columns carefully and consistently.

Dennis has been writing for the magazine for several years. His current aim is to target “the foibles and frustrations of the computer experience, rather than its many successes”, and always with a touch of humor.  I asked him when he began the articles, and he wasn’t sure, but at least 9 years ago, perhaps more.  When I asked him how he found Alamo PC and how the article writing started, he was kind of hazy, but remembered picking up a copy of the magazine at the Bookstop next to Sunset Ridge.  He liked the magazine and thought maybe he could write an occasional review in return for some software.  Somehow the editor of the magazine talked him into becoming a regular columnist instead.  (Note to the reader: this has also been known to happen with the current PC Alamode editor!)

I was curious about his life and career because of some hints I had heard here and there.  Dennis has been self-employed for 30 years, first as a house painter, later as a fulltime freelance writer, and now as a freelance writer and house dad. Dennis says he wrote  whatever would pay the rent (but observe the quality of this list): book reviews, travel articles, feature articles for major magazines like Omni, Smithsonian Air & Space, Windows, Computer Shopper, and others.  His most recent book is The Field Guide to UFOs, co-authored with Patrick Huyghe, and he also puts out a semiannual journal, The Anomalist, with a web site at www.anomalist.com.  This is a full-fledged professional writer we’re talking about here!

Well, and what about computers in his life? Dennis started with a Kaypro II (there’s one in the Alamo PC museum display), Wordstar, and a daisywheel printer. As a writer, he could quickly see – even at that early and rudimentary level – that this was the way to go. This was so much more efficient than typing, correcting, and re-typing a manuscript as to be unbelievable. There was no turning back for him!

Now he has a Compaq Presario with a 19” monitor and several Macs around the house. He uses computers for e-mail, writing, web research, and monitoring his stock portfolio (which he calls “an increasingly masochistic exercise in futility”). Have computers changed his life? Dennis said: “Apart from ruining my eyes, flattening my posterior, and forcing me into a sedentary lifestyle?” Then he admitted to the potential of high production for writers and other people because of computers – the potential, he insisted, not always the reality!