Author Bio
I am an American of Irish descent on both sides of my family tree and I've been knocking about the world most of my life, in one fashion or another, because of my military career. My Irish ancestors left County Mayo, Ireland in the early 19th century, like so many others, to try and make a better life in Amerikay, to coin an Irish idiom. In time, some of their descendants immigrated to the United States for the same reasons. Canada in the 19th century was not an economic powerhouse.
As a kid, we moved around a lot as my late father had been in and out of the military from 1945 to 1968. He was a WWII (1945), Korean War (1952), and Vietnam War (1965) veteran and suffered massively from what we now call PTSD. After my paternal grandmother passed away in 1968, we eventually settled on an old farm in Aroostook County, Maine when I was thirteen. As a teenager, I learned how to farm, hunt for food, and live poor, although I didn't understand that I was living in such abject poverty until I left home a week out of high school to join the military.
At age 18, I enlisted in the U.S. military to get away from my dysfunctional family and see the world. They offered me a much better standard of living than what I ever had at home. I left for basic training a week after graduating from high school in June, 1974, and travelled to many countries around the world, some of which were active war zones, during my more than twenty three years of service. I also learned a lot of blue collar trades through the years, courtesy of the military, and I finally retired from the Army Reserves in November of 2004.
During my many years of working in the trades, I started out, after basic training, as a marine diesel mechanic (think boats and ships), achieving master level competency by 1993. I left active duty in 1993 and in 1999, I used my G.I. Bill benefit to go back to school and become a certified refrigeration mechanic (HVACR) and low voltage electrician (appliance repair) through a VoTech college in Knoxville, TN, a field in which I worked in until late 2019. I also enlisted in the Army Reserves after I graduated from my HVACR school, and in January of 2002, my unit was called up to deploy to Afghanistan to support Operation Enduring Freedom for a year. After I returned home in November 2002, and retired from the Army reserves a couple years later, I moved my family to Caribou, Maine. I started a small appliance repair business soon after we settled in, that spanned ten of those years (commercial and residential appliance repair) and then in December of 2019, I was given another opportunity to go back to school during the Covid lock downs of 2020, courtesy of my disabled veterans benefits. By the end of the year, I became a certified IT technician/IT network engineer at age 64. Within days of my graduation in late October, we had sold our house in Texas and moved to Virginia. I went to work for the state of Virginia as an IT tech in early 2021 until I retired from commuting to work every day at age 66 and a half. That was when I became eligible for my full social security benefits. I still worked part-time doing the occasional IT gig jobs now and again for an IT staffing company until my 70th birthday. Now, I spend my time working on my own IT equipment and systems, helping out family and friends occasionally, and writing as much as I can.
During my multiple military deployments overseas (8), I had the opportunity to see and live in a lot of different places around the world. I've been to Europe, far east Asia, the south Pacific, the middle east, and north Africa during my career. I've also visited or lived in forty nine of the fifty states, travelled to half of the Canadian provinces and northern Mexico, plus a few Island nations in the Caribbean.
I currently live in central Virginia, USA, where I write fictional short stories and novels, write in this blog and in a couple of corporate online blog platforms, saying whatever's on my mind, produce and host a weekly podcast called The Village Oak Tree, plus I travel around the country photographing landscapes and famous places.
Growing up, my late Mother always encouraged me to read books since we spent a lot of time indoors during the long, cold Maine winters. I'm a ferocious reader, even now. I think it's this love of reading that led me to think about writing stories. I've written some short stories over the last few years and published them on my Medium.com and Substack pages. But it seemed that not many people wanted to read stories about Irish folklore or fictional military exploits on these sites, so I stopped posting them. I plan to turn them into anthologies and I'll start self-publishing them on my own.
My future plans are to find time to write more books in my Fugitives in a New United States series. After Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president again in 2023, I came up with the idea for Fugitives in a New United States. All of this chaos motivates me to want to create more stories about regular Americans living under a fascist Christian theocracy. The second book in the series, The Camps, has been started so stay tuned.
For anyone interested in reading my books, but don't want to buy a hard copy or a paperback, I'll share this website, Books2Read.com, that has links to the major book retailers that are selling eBook copies for people to read.
Visitors may reach out to me using the social media links in this web site or through the contact page to ask questions or to just say hello. Sláinte
Chat With Me
I also active on Bluesky at T. Ó Domhnaill@todomhnaill.substack.com
