Philip Brewer

I write science fiction and fantasy stories. It’s not the only thing I do, but it’s the thing that I think of first these days when I’m trying to come up with self-identifying characteristics.

I also write about money. I’m one of the writers at Wise Bread, a personal finance blog with a frugality bent. Our tag line is “Living large on a small budget.” Now that I’m a full-time writer, I have a very personal interest in exactly that topic. You can see all my Wise Bread posts in Philip Brewer’s blog at Wise Bread.

In order to work on my fiction writing skills, I went to Clarion, the science fiction and fantasy writers’ workshop, in the summer of 2001. I learned a lot and I had a great time. I’ve written a lot about Clarion in my Clarion Journal.

The other possibly interesting thing I do besides writing is speak Esperanto. Sometimes the activities overlap–I wrote the article “Dolaroj kaj eŭroj grandbilete” which appeared in Monato, the monthly Esperanto-language news magazine. Whether you speak Esperanto or not, if you’re in the area and are interested, please come to the meetings of the East-Central Illinois Esperanto Club.

Besides Champaign, I’ve lived in Kalamazoo, Ft. Lauderdale, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles among other places. So far, I think I like Champaign best. Or, more specifically, I think I like Urbana best. In most practical ways, they’re essentially the same town. But Urbana seems more like the sort of place I want to live. Champaign is great, too, though. It has a much more interesting downtown scene now than it did when I moved here twenty years ago.

Until the site was closed on August 24th, 2007, I worked as a software engineer for Motorola at the Motorola Urbana Design Center.

For private communication, I have a PGP key.