PHOTO CREDIT: JOHN HART

Few people have the leisure to sit down and write novels.  No matter how colorful a childhood I had to draw from, I was no exception.  My pen, however, was linked to my living since college days in the minimally creative field of spinning out marketing research surveys.

Even as I wrote a tale or two for my friends, my employers continued to find me useful for writing seminars, speeches, and technical manuals alongside my regular workload.  Guided by my interests in business, science and technology, I took the academic and business route that would eventually land me in the role of founding executive director of a science museum.

Along the way, never forgetting my passion for experience and expression, I dabbled in martial arts and acting, made a name for myself as a daring federal agent, tested the mean underside of the music industry, and ultimately discovered some truth behind mysterious ailments I could no longer ignore.

By now they had a name for the condition I struggled to overcome all my life even us I knocked down my paralyzing stage fright and my fear of any and all heights.  This condition was called dyscalculia, sometimes referred to as "math dyslexia" for its near-catastrophic effects on the ability to do arithmetic. My form of it includes something much worse than running to a calculator to figure the diner check.  The descriptions or symptoms, courtesy of dyscalculia.org, read like an astrological workup.  From good to bad, nearly all of the characteristics describe me to perfection:

Normal or accelerated language acquisition: verbal, reading, writing. Good visual memory for the printed word. Good in the areas of science (until a level requiring higher math skills is reached), geometry (figures with logic, not formulas), and creative arts.

Mistaken recollection of names. Poor name/face retrieval.    Inability to recall schedules, and sequences of past or future events. Unable to keep track of time. Poor memory for the "layout" of things. Gets lost or disoriented easily. May have a poor sense of direction, lose things often, and seem absent minded.

When I worked in a large government complex with over a hundred people answering to me, their best entertainment was watching me cross the room and change directions with second, third, and even fourth afterthoughts.  If this were not enough, I also have a touch of synesthesia, or crossed senses.  In particular, lacking a sense of time, confusing the passage of years with days, can be crippling if you don't develop coping mechanisms, but has led me to a fascination with disabilities and time travel that created and fueled the WADE OF AQUITAINE series.

© 2008 Ben Parris. All rights reserved.