On Other Shores

Nelson McKeeby was born with autism and severe epilepsy in Spirit Lake, Iowa to a navy officer and a grade school teacher in the 1960s. He dropped out of high school at age sixteen and was told he was not suitable for formal education due to his handicaps. Seeking some form of employment he fell into a career as a television director specializing in fashion merchandizing and later became a commercial producer and an engineer.In his youth Nelson developed a range of hobbies that included hitchhiking - where he traveled across America, Mexico and the length of the Appalachian trial; role playing games; writing, and taking college courses for fun since he was not allowed to enroll full-time. In 1995 though he earned an accidental bachelors degree from a New England college, and followed it up with a Masters degree and a Masters of Fine Arts. He has at times found employment as a college professor, television producer, an engineer, a user interface designer, and as a professional writer. He served as a deputy sheriff and as a senior producer for the Department of Justice Office of Legal Education. He has also founded and lead technology research centers and worked with grant writing.Nelson has a long history of writing strange things, from role playing games to video manuals on how to prosecute terrorists. He also works with extending human capabilities with robotics in creative media, social media analysis for marketing, and in a range of digital to analog technologies.Nelson works extensively with neurodiversity and believes that many diverse mental courses from PTSD to autism are natural ways that the human species uses diverse cognition to survive troubled times. Instead of being handicaps, he considers many of them as super powers which may not result in the easiest or more comfortable life for the person who has them, but that is beneficial to the social group as a whole.