Hello. Welcome to our DEV Web Site.
Some of our favorite travel images are in a slideshow. To see the show click HERE.
Several of our favorite images are organized by year.To choose pix from the years 2010 to 2023 click HERE.
To choose pix from the years 1993 to 2009 click HERE.
NOTE: Page displays for favorite personal Drawings and Paintings organized by medium are under construction.
New Venture: Our second book length release under this title: a collection of 10 short pieces of speculative/historic fiction in book form (See book covers above)published November 21, 2022 under the title Cassiopeia's Quest - Revelation. The stories in this new release were set in motion in an earlier version of the collection, Cassiopeia's Quest, published June 2018. In all our releases since June 2018 the stories remain the same, basically, but we focus on character development, plot and story telling rather than rely too heavily on summary, background and context descriptions to carry the story, as we did in our earlier releases. In my experience reading fiction, overuse of description and summary is unsatisfactory as a reading experience. As we have done in each book since the first, These 10 stories and their 10 young female protagonists each help to define and illuminate the evolving culture and hard-won humanity of the species known as homo sapiens. Our descent from the closed and comforting environment among the enfolding trees to a harsher, more open, more challenging savanna makes us who we are. The chronology in the 10 stories is long; ...from a resting place for nomadic hunter-gatherers in the east African Savanna 100,000 years ago to a commercial crab boat crewed by women in the Bering Sea Crab fishery in the near future. Their boat, the "Aleutian Challenger" is working far to the west far off Alaska's northwest coast. They are north of the Aleutian Chain near St. Paul Island. Click this link HERE. It will take you to an 8 minute YouTube video with the paintings, protagonists and story lines at the root of each of the 10 stories I have written for Cassiopeia's Quest, and Cassiopeia's Quest - Revelation. I have carefully selected a 500 to 1500 word excerpt from each of the stories and commentaries in the November 2019 release. They are available for reading or, on some newer computers, audio listening, as introductions to the fiction in each of the 10 stories by clicking HERE. The 10 excerpts are in a single .PDF file. Click HERE. to see a 3 minute video showing the image and name of each protagonist associated with the story title. Cassiopeia's Quest and Cassiopeia's Quest - Revelation are both available for purchase on Amazon in an eBook format downloadable into a Kindle reader for $5.50; or in paperback with no imagery for $18.50. An illustrated version of Cassiopeia's Quest with 12 pages of full color maps and illustrations - released in June 2018 - is also available on Amazon for $15.00. A few "near new" copies leftover from earlier print runs of these volumes will also be available at $5.00 each whenever I sell books at a Public Market. Click HERE to connect to my book page on Amazon. When you click on the book's cover you can learn more about Cassiopeia's Quest and Cassiopeia's Quest - Revelation. You can add the book to your cart, and then purchase by following Amazon's standard procedures for payment and shipping. We support independent book sellers and local printers so the books listed above are also available as paperbacks through local book sales venues and outlets in Juneau and Skagway, Alaska. Wider distributions to independent book sellers around Alaska and across the U.S. are in the works. With enough advance notice and some help with travel I am happy to take myself, the books and some research notes and images on the road for public presentations and book sales.My Business Venture.
My work day is mostly spent writing, editing and book promotion and selling. When possible I do some drawing and painting for relaxation, with some digital media and small systems design client projects thrown in to spice up my workdays. Gardening, reading, teaching, potlucks with friends, and planning trips to visit children, grandchildren, siblings and extended families around north America round out my social life. In other words, mostly, I am a lucky guy with more than my share of things to be thankful for. My mom, for example, passed away quietly and fully lucid in April of last year at age 104. Shortly after, in June, her oldest great granddaughter (my oldest grandchild) graduated highschool and is now a first year student at a great private college in the east. At this writing it is two weeks before Thanksgiving 2022. We are in the third year of the Pandemic with, so far, no COVID. With so much good fortune, all the preceding statements are even more heartfelt. Click HERE to link to my business web site, Small Systems Design Associates. We are based in Juneau, Alaska, USA. ALL RIGHTS ARE RESERVED.Small Systems Design Associates built the original Small Systems site, and this original site during 2010. We did a major technical upgrade, redesign, and rebuild of the Small Systems site in 2012, and then rebuilt this site in May, 2014. All the original source files with the most recent updates were destroyed in a computer/network/HDD crash; the site was then re-installed from backup onto rebuilt equipment on 5/22/2017. This page was re-designed and updated 12/3/2018 and, today, 5/30/2023 to reflect the re-issue of Cassiopeia's Quest - Revelation as Edition 1 under a new ISBN# and new cover. The stories remain the same as in the release of June 2018. Writer, painter, science enthusiast and web site designer and developer Jerry Smetzer has now begun work on a full length novel. Wish him well..