The Attunist

Gary B. Haley began life in a military family that occasionally moved to new towns. His young family happily found their way back home to Fort Worth in the late '60s. There, he and his brothers grew up, and the Beatles song "Paperback Writer" inspired him to write. But living near Carswell Air Force Base meant tolerating the thunderous, deafening roar of B-52 bombers lumbering overhead a mere four or five thousand feet. The planes were so low and loud that, at times, they could not even hear each other's shouts. Such an environment often seems to sever much of the day into twenty- or thirty-minute tolerable fragments.

A break from the relentless chaos came with a move to a waterfront home on a quiet cove of a nearby lake, where Haley finished high school. Despite the better lifestyle of country living, he ultimately moved back to Fort Worth and accepted a defense industry job so that he could work his way through college, support his new family, and do his part to support America's military. Soon afterwards though, Haley found himself a single parent, and did his best to meet the challenges of trying to raise two daughters while working full time, ghostwriting part time, and finishing his software engineering degree.

Haley worked about 15 years in the defense industry, often traveling with a team to other Air Force bases, Central America, Europe, and/or the Mideast. Many pieces of his Attune Trilogy were based on these experiences. The environments where his job took him finally became too violent, so he took a job as a software engineer.

His daughters have long since grown up and, between them, have four bright kids of their own. Haley moved to Denver in 2005 where he married a brilliant doctor, retired from software engineering to raise their son, and writes in his “spare” time.