About Me

Summary

  • Software Architect / Software Developer
  • Author
  • Yakuza Executive Consultant (seriously – and don’t ask)

Contact Me

The Short Version

I’m Benjamin (“Ben”) Cohen — software architect and developer by trade, writer by inclination, and a person who has spent most of his life being the youngest and usually the smartest in whatever room he happened to be in. That last part sounds arrogant. It’s more complicated than that.

I grew up literally crawling around IBM computer room floors — my mother was a Systems Engineer back when computers filled auditorium-sized rooms and required their own environmental systems. Computers were never mysterious to me; they were just furniture. I skipped two grades, graduated high school at 15, and finished a triple major in Physics, Mathematics, and Computer Science (with a German minor) at St. Peter’s College (now St. Peter’s University) in Jersey City at 19 — while simultaneously assisting with managing the college’s Computer Science department systems and doing part-time software development for a bank in lower Manhattan. One week after graduation I was on a plane to Frankfurt to install software I’d written for that bank.

Four decades in software development across banking, finance, and telecommunications — and still going. I’m currently working from home in Somerset County, New Jersey, which suits me fine,

The Writing

The writing started, somewhat unexpectedly, with preservation rather than creativity. As an only child of only children, I realized that if I didn’t capture the stories of my family, they would simply disappear — there was no one else to save them. The result was “Family Anecdotes”, a self-published collection I put together for my two sons, now adults, and a small number of close friends. I never intended it for public consumption, but the process of writing it revealed something I hadn’t expected: I enjoyed it.

That discovery led to short fiction, which led to the Pub Tales concept, which led to the Kethyras stories, which led to everything currently on this site. Writing remains a hobby rather than a vocation — when something needs to be written, I write it. When it doesn’t, I don’t. This explains the occasional gaps in output that could charitably be described as “extended creative pauses.”

A Tool Worth Mentioning

If you have any intention of doing serious writing, I cannot recommend Scrivener highly enough. I wrote everything — Family Anecdotes and all of the fiction on this site — in Scrivener. I have no affiliation with Literature & Latte; I’m just an extremely satisfied customer who thinks writers deserve to know it exists.

If you’ve read this far and find yourself wanting more — the full story, the unabridged version, the part where things get considerably more complicated and interesting — the Okay, Fine. But Remember – You Asked For the Details page exists for exactly that purpose. Don’t say you weren’t warned.