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About Author John T. Cullen (Brief Info)
Update Autumn 2021. I recently acquired all three major JohnTCullen domains (COM, NET, ORG) which I plan to link together as a subplex on my overall webplex. Accordingly, I am rearranging the information about my author career (poetry, fiction, journalism/nonfiction) across all three domains in a top-down, optimized fashion. More info soon. [JTC]
COM, NET, ORG. My anchor website for decades has been johntcullen dot COM. Note the toggle for all three (COM, NET, ORG) installed late 2021 in the main navigation bar on all three. I am moving the info from johntcullenCOM to johntcullenNET to make room for my most important announcements at the COM site. So far, I am only moving my Holidays subplex to the ORG site. I created the Holidays group a few years ago under the rubric SONDJ (Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec, Jan/New Year's) to celebrate our movement into the autumn/winter holidays each year, culminating with New Year's Eve.
John T. Cullen. My English-speaking name (John) is my main author name in North America (USA and Canada). I don't seek publicity of any sort but a minimum of information seems necessary to help readers with BRAND and related considerations. My birth name (European) is Jean Thomas Cullen, Jean being the French version of John. I get along well in Quebec, Canada as Jean but it causes all sorts of confusion in the Anglophone world. I have published one or two of my 50ish books (novels, poetry, journalistic nonfiction) as Jean Thomas Cullen. My nonfiction and my major novels (e.g., Siberian Girl, Orbital Sniper, and CON2: Washington Under Siege are all John T. Cullen titles.
John Argo. In the late 1990s, when digital and online publishing broke through the concentration camp wall of New York cartel publishing, those of us who had been struggling outside the pomerium for years could celebrate. By 'us' I mean those men and women who were born to write from wonder and passion, the way birds are meant to sing in the forest, for the sheer joy of it. For me, it brought back that science fiction Sense of Wonder to finally be able to reach readers without having the money claws of the print cartel around our necks; long story for another day. It's just the real, often dark, and sadly inescapable history of publishing if one is interested in truth.
My Classics background (B.A. in English, Univ. of Connecticut, with relateds in comparative Literature, History, Languages, and Classics) handed me the inspiration of a lifetime: Argo was the Bronze Age ship of wonder, on which Jason and his Argonauts (literally "Argo-Sailors") launched forth into the deep space of their age (mainly the Aegean, Pontic, and Caspian Seas) on exhilarating adventures. Those Bronze Age exploits are still celebrated in modern times, as in the popular 1963 movie Jason and the Argonauts (with famous special effects by Ray Harryhausen). That's how I became John Argo in publishing my science fiction and suspense fiction, with a tiny bit of fantasy and science-horror sprinkled in. You can find all that on the developing John Argo website, which has its own subplex for Speculative Fiction (Empire of Time, DarkSF) and Suspense (Thriller Street).By the way, Argo Navis (Ship Argo) became the largest constellation in the southern skies until modern astronomers divided the unwieldy giant into its component ship-parts (keel, sail, poop deck, etc); story for another day.
About the Webplex
Overall View. I am consolidating a lot of linked websites in my webplex, turning them into folders on this website. As I add content on this website, please look on the Contents page for links to that content. More info soon. [JTC]
Terminology. As a Web publishing pioneer since 1996, I have constructed a *webplex* of several dozen linked websites. Some of those are linked thematically at a subordinate level (making them part of a *subplex*). Quick example: the overall anchor for my webplex (group of linked websites owned by me) is San Diego Author. Most of the linked websites link directly to that site. A few, like these holiday sites (for September, October, November, December, and New Year's) form a *subplex* in that they are linked to each other for easy navigation.
Brief Clocktower Books Info
World's First HTML Novels. In the mid to late 1990s, joined by other pioneers like Brian Callahan, A. L. Sirois, Dennis Latham, John K. Muir, and Shaun Farrell among others, I began publishing my work and that of submitting authors on the internet and in print/digital book formats. We published not only the world's first HTML novels, but also the first professional SFFH magazine starting 1998 (Deep Outside SFFH, later Far Sector SFFH). Museum sites can be found online at the Clocktower Books Museum website. Many of our authors went on to win every major award in the Speculative Fiction world, not just Nebulas and Hugos in the USA, but globally across the Commonwealth as well.
I take pride in stating that I wrote and we published the world's first HTML novels as I call them, by these criteria: (a) proprietary, owned by the author, not public domain, which rules out the Gutenberg Project types; (b) published free, given that there was no significant e-commerce yet; (c) published entirely online to be read online, not on portable media like floppies, disks, etc; (d) published entirely in HTML code. Also: we used an innovative format of weekly chapter releases, usually on Sunday afternoons PST; so for example a certain lady arriving at work in the morning in Johannesberg, South Africa could sneak a quick read on her office computer with her morning coffee (relatively few people had home computers yet, even among the technically advanced who were often my best audience, especially for advanced SF). Brian and I made my novels available for quick TXT format download because many readers sent breathless notes begging for more because they couldn't wait to learn how their current novel (by John Argo) ends. Speaking of advanced SF, many non-tech savvy readers including at least two Ph.D.s (one in Literature, the other in Drama) could not comprehend This Shoal of Space, written 1990, way before the SF movie The Matrix brought the Virtual Reality (VR) concept into public awareness.
The first of these HTML novels, as I call them, or the world's first real online e-books, was my suspense thriller Neon Blue (Girl, Unlocked) (Neon Blue Fiction, April 1996). This was soon followed by my SF novel This Shoal of Space (The Haunted Village SFFH website, July 1996). Among the many to follow was my prophetic political thriller CON2: The Generals of October warning against a Second Constitutional Convention (CON2). After the 6 Jan 2021 insurrection in the U.S. Capital (and U.S. Capitol Building), I quickly re-released an edition of CON2 under the title Washington Under Siege: Autumn of the Republic, a Prophetic Constitution Thriller. Sadly, although I first wrote CON2 (original title) in 1990, and it received 109 rejection slips from the print cartel, even today it remains in the nebulae beyond public and expert awareness; so I dread to see the day that the oligarchs currently tearing the USA apart (divide and conquer) will go beyond the 6 Jan 2021 insurrection and invoke Article V of the U.S. Constitution with catastrophic results…again, you have to read the novel, in which I thought the whole process out in terrifying detail.
You can read a lot more about our history as publishing pioneers online at the Clocktower Books website and also at the
Clocktower Books Museum website. Bottom line of all bottom line: let the work speak for itself. We were violently trolled by the print cartel and the smaller SF pulp cartel plus whatever onhangers, but ultimately we made history and deserve to be read. In the late 1990s, before e-commerce, and before the print cartel caught wind, I had avid readers around the world on all continents except Antarctica (penguins don't seem to read English).I I received enthusiastic, rapt fan mail from all around the globe, some of which I printed out and now feature in the Reviews section of my website Caffeine Books—see sample page and read on from there. Lots to discover.
Our professional online SFFH magazine is mentioned in the SF Encyclopedia and we're hoping for more historical coverage as researchers get past the print industry and look for the truths about this vitally important (digital and online) branch of modern publishing.
I am a member of several professional author organizations, including the International Thriller Writers (ITW). I am an Active Member of ITW, and Clocktower Books is an ITW-recognized publisher. More info: Clocktower Books Museum website.
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