Robert Moore has wrestled with words since his school days in Oregon, working on his school newspaper, North Eugene Highlander. He studied journalism for four years at the University of Oregon before serving as an information specialist in the United States Army in Vietnam and Germany until 1972. Over the years other callings have usually pushed personal writing projects on the back burner. They have been easier to share, more tangible and more immediately gratifying. He has enjoyed playing music, keeping horses, restoring and sailing an elderly boat, jogging, swimming and diving. He met his first wife, a New Zealander, in Germany. They settled in New Zealand in 1974 where he started a forty-year career as a newspaper copy editor, in Rotorua, Whangarei and Auckland. In the 1980s he decided to write something of his own, a not-too-thrilling crime “thriller”, that turned out to be so boring that not even friends and family could finish it, let alone prospective publishers. About twenty years ago, he left the New Zealand Herald and returned to Oregon for a year with Angela his second wife and their young son Richard for a long, overdue family visit. He has now been back in New Zealand for a further 20 years, again as a newspaper copy editor. He has seen a second delightful son be born and grow up and is relishing the retired life in Te Atatu South, while having another bash at writing something of his own, despite all the delightful distractions that remain.