All About the Author

Howard Parsons

Howard Parsons was born in Petersburg, VA during the final days of King George VI’s reign. He grew up and attended school in nearby Hopewell, VA. The eldest son of Lucile and Howard T. Parsons Sr., he attended North Carolina College in Rocky Mount, NC and graduated in 1974 with a BS degree in Biology. Although his interests lay in Virology and Marine Biology, the need to earn a living led him to the field Information Technology. During his stint with the Michie Company in Charlottesville, VA, he developed the TOOL programming language and in 2008, wrapped up a 30-year career in legal publishing.

Howard is now a retired software engineer, ending a stint with the Dematic Corp. in March of 2016. He lives at The Parsonage in Charlottesville with his wife and the latest two three moggies in a long line of house cats. His interests include pipe collecting, Scottish highland games, railroads and heraldry.

For more information, have a look at Howard’s Professional Biography.

Howard has been fascinated with the idea of mermaids since he was around five years old. Just how he came to have this fascination with mermaids is lost in the mists of time. Over the years, it has provided a sort of mental playground where he could escape from life’s pressures and obligations. Perhaps, this is the same rationale that makes mermaid stories a perennial favourite.

Rather than hew to the usual ideas of undersea royalty, wars between rival tribes, forbidden love, etc., he found himself envisioning a world where mermaids and mermen had jobs just like the rest of us and tried to live a normal life by the sea. In his series, Tails From Colony Island, Howard Parsons will show that mermaids and mermen are just regular folks … or almost so.

Howard Parsons - Author