His first eighty years ...
During early adlthood, Chris Mathison relaxed, resided or did business in 40+ countries.
As such, he missed half of the 70s and all of the 80s and 90s in America.
Along with changing locales, Chris frequently changed careers. He worked as a college instructor, reference librarian, concert producer, discotheque designer, circus advanceman,
freelance journalist, real estate developer, computer programmer, and a few other odd jobs he says he can no longer recall.
One highly memorable gig, however, was a brief stint as a feature writer for Blue Swan (the in-flight magazine of Aeroflot Soviet Airlines)
at the height of the Cold War while serving as a "consultant" for the U.S. State Department. "My fun-filled journey has involved a series of wholesale lifestyle and costume changes." Other writing gigs included news articles and magazie features for numerous Asian publications, including The Japan Times, Tokyo Journal, and several inflight magazines. 
Looking back at those decades abroad,
Chris cites his appearance representing Apple's nascent voice recognition technology
at New Zealand's innaugural multimedia conference in 1994 as a professional highlight.
Following Microsoft's Bill Gates's keynote address, Chris greeted the audience with, "Everybody here knows my predecessor. But nobody knows me. Yet our stories are really the same. Just delete six zeros."  A few other highlights: Chris wrote the world's first bilingual (English/Japanese) word processor.
ZA>COM/Kenkyusha/NEC 1983-1988. For this product, Chris was profiled in Japan's leading newspaper, Asahi Shimbun,
as one of three foreigners who had made significant technical contributions to Japanese society.In the nineties, after switching from desktop applications to multimedia, Chris wrote the world's first interactive application to display digital video (Hello QuickTime! Apple, 1991); and the world's first multimedia program driven by voice recognition (AIT Multimedia, Apple, 1993). |
Since returning to the States, Chris has authored database-intensive web applications, namely Tracking-At-A-Glance®
(Designing Success, Inc, 2003-2025) , a case management program currently used by public housing agencies, tribal councils,
and social welfare organizations nationwide.
At the same time, Chris was pleased to note that an English business letter writing handbook
he co-authored in 1988 is still in print and selling well on Amazon.
He has also edited his wife's scientific papers for publication, curated his late father's art, and
coached his daughter's soccer teams.
His prized possession is a trophy he received upon his retirement from coaching inscribed with, "World's Oldest Soccer Coach."
Chris currently resides in Pearland, Texas, with his wife Megumi and their three dogs,
Freddie (Scottie), Milky Way (Westie) and Geronimo ("Weeniehuahua").
Their daughter Robin recently graduated from UC Santa Cruz and now works as a software engineer.
Chris enjoys interior design, indoor holography, and monitoring the fourteen fountains on five lakes in his subdivision.
He loves listening to music while tooling around to check if the fountains are spraying well and while writing fiction.
Below, you can find several tunes that accompanied the creation of Altered Estates. Currently, Chris is working on a screenplay adaptation of the novel.
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Publication Samples
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