1. I am retired from fanfic. No more Dawson stories, no more XFBandit stories, nothing.
    
2. In a few months, there will be an Ellipsis timeline document, sort of an outline, that will explain how the story was supposed to end. So at least you'll get that kind of closure.
    
3. Keep your eyes peeled on this website. Just because I've retired from writing XF Fanfic doesn't mean that I've stopped writing alltogether. I've got some exciting things coming up, and if you liked Umbra, ELS and Ellipsis, I'm sure you'll love what's coming next.

I'd like to take this opportunity to sincerely apologize to all the people who wrote and begged and pleaded with me to finish Ellipsis. I know that I promised I would, and I hate more than anything in the world having to break that promise. I'm not the sort of person that does things like this lightly, but the truth of the matter is that I just do not have the time or the energy or even the desire to finish that story. If you want to bitch and moan at me (it won't work, but give it yer best shot,) I can be reached at either drambo@sonic.net or drambo@airmonitor.com.

January 16, 2001
Well, because of a work project, I had to learn frames, so the site is now frame-enabled. Hope you can all enjoy it this way. I think it looks particularly cool. If anyone notices anything "broken" please drop me an email here. 

January 5, 2001
Well, a new year, and finally an update! I promised you folks some new Ellipsis stuff around Christmas. I am reminded of that old joke that goes, "I love deadlines. I love the "swoowshing" noise they make as they fly by." There's a lot going on in RamboLand right now. I got married three months ago, my stepson is now living with us, busy, busy, busy. I am fighting two competing feelings: The first is trying to tell me to just cancel Ellipsis and get on with my life. Bid a fond farewell to XF Fanfic and start doing something else with my writing. The other half just can't seem to put that final nail in the coffin, and hopes that I will somehow find the time, energy and creative focus I need to finish the damn thing. I mean, I know how the story is supposed to end. (It's actually kind of a cool ending...) I've also had ideas about some new XF stories...but something about fanfic, and the current state of the community itself, is keeping me from actually writing. Perhaps it's fear. ELS attracted so much positive attention, maybe I'm afraid that I won't be able to top it. Maybe I should stop trying to top ELS and just let Ellipsis happen. For whatever it's worth, I will try and keep this update page going so that people who have questions can check here. 

Ellipsis current status: ON HOLD. No promises, but no threats, either.
Other Writing: Finishing a longish essay for Working Stiffs on how to write a good thriller.

February 26, 2000
Renegade:Los Angeles, the first (and probably only,) XFBandit sequel, is now available by clicking here. I may write a third and final installment of the Renegade series, titled Renegade:Endgame, but I haven't decided yet.I am halfway through Chapter 14 of Ellipsis.

February 2, 2000
Due to popular demand, I put some of the banners back up. Some people call 'em dustjackets, some call 'em "adverts" or "blurbs." Those little movie-poster/TV-Guide thingies that I did for my short stories, Umbra and ELS chapters are now back on their respective pages. I'm missing about 5 of 'em, and if anyone's got 'em, I'd appreciate having you send them my way. Enjoy!

January 30, 2000
Welcome to the new Millenium. I know I promised a story called Taken sometime around Thanksgiving, and we're rapidly heading towards Valentine's Day, but them's the breaks, I guess. What I've posted today is the first creative fiction work that I've done in over a year. I hope you enjoy it. There actually might be a sequel to this Bandit story; I'm still deciding if I want to write Renegade: Los Angeles and Renegade: Geneva yet. I think the basic premise of the story does easily lend itself to sequels, but I don't want to tempt myself into writing easy Bandit stories when I should be busting my hump to finish the re-edits of old Ellipsis chapters so that the new chapters will actually make some kind of sense.

So, tell me what you think of this new Bandit story.

December 13, 1999
...and the beat goes on....

OK. Enough of that. Two new additions to the website today. Actually, four, if you count the way I do. I took all my short stories as Dawson (minus The Assignment) and put them into a single Word97 document that's formatted much like a hardback book would be. I also did the same for my collection of stories as XFBandit. Then I took those two documents and converted them to Adobe PDF format.

Why PDF? Because I've always been frustrated by having to deliver my stuff in flat-ASCII for the newsgroups. Yes, I could post to the ng in RTF format, but that would arouse howls of protest from people with newsreaders that can't handle the format. Likewise with Word97 format. So, since I got my hands on Adobe PDF Writer, I decided to fool around with it for a week or so and see what havoc I could wreak.

You now have the ability to study my handiwork. If you don't have the Acrobat 4.0 Plugin or Reader, you can go here to download it. The nice thing is that the PDF format is designed to move between different platforms without a single lost step. What a Windows viewer sees is exactly what a Mac or Linux user will see. No more worries about absent fonts (I use a light version of Garamond in 9pt for the text body, and it renders beautifully in my Acrobat) or people missing Word97. It just plain works. And it gives me the creative freedom to display my stories the way I want to!

What operating system does Adobe support? GLAD you asked!!
Windows 95/98
Windows NT Workstation & Server
Windows 3.1
Macintosh PowerPC
Macintosh 68K
Linux
IBM AIX
SunOS
Solaris
x86 Solaris
SGI IRIX
HP-UX
Digital Unix
OS/2

When I originally asked the ng what they thought about Acrobat as a format, I was urged to publish the stuff in HTML format. While that is all well and good, I must admit that when working with large documents, HTML can be a tad...frustrating. It doesn't give me the line-break control I want without resorting to tables, and those get complicated very quickly. Word97 is also nice, but the final "rendered" text doesn't have the nice anti-alias shading that Acrobat gives me. In the end, I decided to offer everything I write from here on out in Plain ASCII Text format (what you've always seen,) Word97 format, and Adobe PDF.

Let me reiterate: I have no intention of EVER depriving anyone of any of the standard Internet formats. ASCII-Text will always be available. Forever. Without fail. Word97 and PDF are just a way for me to express some more creativity. :)

November 28, 1999
Well, folks, welcome to the new website. As you may notice as you click and browse around, this is kind of a basic site. Most of the images you might remember from the old site were lost in the move, and I just don't have the time to re-create them.

Yes, my move to Santa Rosa is complete. Annie and I are living together, and couldn't be happier. There has been some adjusting to do: New city, new job, new family, all that cool and wonderful stuff. I have finally started to find the time to sit down and write.

For fans of The Assignment, I hate to dissapoint you, but it looks like that story is going to go the way of the Dodo bird and die. If anyone wants to finish the story for me, drop me a line and we'll discuss your vision of where the story should go.

Ellipsis fans, do not worry. I am in the process of retooling some of the backsory, and I may re-issue some earlier chapters in order to make everything come together. Probably around late December, but you all know how horrible I've been about keeping any kind of deadline, so don't hold your breath. Check back on this page often for updates. As always, they'll go in reverse order, with the newest updates at the top.

As for the new story, Taken, I haven't decided if I'm going to post it yet. In actuality, Annie and I were talking over the weekend, and together we managed to come up with a way to express my central vision of the story without having to make too many compromises that I was afraid would cripple the other version. I'm in the process of rewriting almost 100% of the 40+ pages I'd already written, so again, that may take a few weeks. Once Taken is finished, I'll be ready to pick up Ellipsis where I left off.

The patches. I've gotten a lot of questions as to what that was all about. My girlfriend's son, Ryan, who turned 17 last year, had expressed an interest in becoming a police officer, even going so far as to attend the Santa Rosa Student Policy Academy (a sort of "get acquainted" thing for high school students,) and so I decided to collect as many PD patches as I could for him.