Anthrofiction Network

Manager: Scott Miller (ScottyDM)

Vacationing, western Colorado, 2002

I’m known in the offline world as Scott Miller, but online I’m ScottyDM. I live in Colorado Springs, Colorado (USA) with my wife Arlene. Our daughter Tiffany is a freelance scientific illustrator and living in Denver.

I have a B.S.E.E (bachelor of science in electrical engineering) and have been involved in electronics design, with technical writing on the side, for many years.

I became involved with online multiuser virtual reality about May of 1997. I got my own VR world in 2000, SkunkWks in the AW universe, and started thinking about bots (non-player characters) in 2002.

View from west of Pikes Peak, 2002

I wanted to design characters with personality that would entertain visitors to my world, but the technology for bots was, and still is, very limited. In late 2002 I started writing down a series of scenes to detail how I wanted my bots to interact. A few months later I was inspired by Spaceship Story by Fae Aura whom I knew from virtual reality, and later Sabrina Online, the Story by Chris Yost and Zig Zag, the Story by James Bruner. My thought was, “Hey, I could turn my scenes into a real story!”

I posted the first two chapters of Bot Story Book 1: Nancy and the Ferrets to my website in April of 2003, and by October of the same year I’d finished the seventh and final chapter of that “book”.

Contract chip design, Compaq, 2002

With no plot, no plan, and poor fiction writing skills (technical writing is much easier) the story was pretty good—or so I thought. Hungry for feedback I stumbled into Critique Circle and joined in October of 2004. I began to see all the things that were wrong with my original story. In fact I’m a bit embarrassed by it today. I also started writing more stories.

I’ve written several short stories and novellas and participated in the summer and fall Watching Stone Anthro Story Contest in 2005 when Nathan Ryan (Nadan) managed it. My story Family Matters (PDF) won the fall contest. I’ve since participated in NaNoWriMo for 2005 and 2007, and start a lot more stories than I finish.

And I design and code websites.

Contact Me

Use the handy e-mail form to send me a message.