Mark Bowles

Mark E. Bowles has been writing fiction since the early 1970. He has a three-inch-thick folder of unpublished short stories, and a nice collection of rejection notices they have garnered from such prestigious publications as The New Yorker and Playboy. His efforts in long-form fiction date back to the early 1990s, with the first draft of "Norton The Third" written on weekends, holidays, and after the invention of laptops, on airplanes.

By far his most well-known efforts in imaginative prose, however, consist of proposals, project plans, technical documentation and sales literature for companies he led or worked for during his fifty-year career as a software developer, manager and entrepreneur.

A lifelong amateur theatre fanatic, Mark has also designed scenery and lighting, stage managed, acted in and produced dozens of musicals and plays since his debut as Joe Harper, the kid who paints the fence, in Tom Sawyer at age 13. This time-consuming hobby is yet another reason why it took around 25 years for "Norton" to see the light of day.