Hi there. My name is Jason Dettman, though I usually abbreviate it to J.A Dettman on internet forums or when I write something for publication.
This, as you can see, is my homepage. If you're interested, below is a short synopsis of my life. Other attached pages are about various topics that interest me. Feel free to look around. If you want to contact me for any reason, my email address is: jadettman [at] gmail.com
The History of Jason i.e. more than you probably want to know
I was born in Texas in the early 1970s. My father was in the U.S. Air Force so we moved around a bit. Some of my early childhood was in spent Texas, some in Germany, and some in Iowa.
At some point, my parents divorced and my mother met and married my stepfather Al. That's about the time that we moved to Iowa.
In Iowa, we lived in Hazleton for a a few years before moving to Independence where I lived for the majority of my childhood.
When I graduated from high school, I went to the University of Iowa where I graduated with a bachelor's degree in English after 3.5 years. The U of I is also where I met Britt in 1992, she who became my wife seven years later.
During the Iowa City years, I worked in residence hall dining while I was attending the U of I and then later I worked at Arby's in the Old Capitol Mall. The lesson learned there: Don't work in food service. It's rarely pleasant, you come home reeking of old food and the customers treat you like a sub-human.
It was also in Iowa City that I first began gaming. My grandparents had given me a boxed set of D&D for my tenth birthday but I had never found anyone to play with. In the second semester of my first year at the U of I, I met Pete Sauerbrei who hooked me up with my first gaming group. We played D&D. I played a grumpy dwarf. It became a bit of a theme among people that I've gamed with. Maybe I'll tell you about it sometime.
I played D&D until Amber Diceless Roleplaying was published in 1992 and I played that for the first time. The ADRPG was the game for me. No fiddling around with dice, no keeping track of hit points, and roleplaying on a more epic and, at the same time, more personal scale. While I've played other games throughout my gaming career since then I always come back to Amber or a diceless derivative when I can.
When Britt graduated from the U of I with degrees in Physics and Astronomy, we moved to Ithaca, NY where she had been accepted to graduate school at Cornell University.
I got a job working in an retail optical lab making eyeglasses in an hour. After a year or so, I jumped ship to another company and became an apprentice optician and later a License Optician, a job that I worked at for six years. The lesson I learned as an optician: Don't work for asshole bosses. It only stresses you out and you feel a hell of a lot better when you quit.
Near the beginning of 2003, I started my own internet publishing company Cracked Mirror Publishing. I had been toying with the idea since Wizards of the Coast published the 3rd Edition of Dungeons & Dragons under an Open Gaming License which allows anyone to publish derivative material. The publication of Mutants & Masterminds pushed me over the edge with it's point-buy character creation system and, in July of 2003, I published Monsters & Mayhem a fantasy supplement for M&M. Surprisingly, or not depending on your perspective, Monsters & Mayhem sold well and I decided that this signified that I should continue publishing, which I have done. These days, I've come to the realization that I don't mind publishing but that I would probably be happy just writing and letting someone else run the business.
At the end of 2003, I opened a gaming store in Ithaca with a friend of mine. It was a small shop located inside, and on the second floor of, Autumn Leaves Used Books. It was a pretty casual and low-cost start-up for a business and we both felt that Ithaca needed a dedicated gaming store in town, considering the size of the gaming population. The store did moderately well and broke even after a while.
Near the end of 2004, I quit my full-time optician job. In early 2005 I took over running the gaming store and I also got a part-time optician job at Trumansburg Optical. I ran the store for about a year and a half. That was a good time but it came to an end in mid-2006 when Britt was hired at Beloit College for the Fall term. The lesson I learned from going into business with a friend: Resist the temptation unless you want to be on less friendly terms.
So, at the end of July 2006, Britt and I moved to Beloit, WI. We got an apartment downtown, Britt started work at the College, and I started looking for a job. After a couple months I was hired part-time at Turtle Creek Bookstore (aka the Beloit College Bookstore). Part-time really wasn't going to cut the mustard, though, so I kept looking for something full-time. Eventually, after several interviews with companies that wanted to hire me (tempting though they were, most of them involve a longer commute than I wanted to deal with or involved crazy hours which would make it difficult to spend time with Britt), the folks at the bookstore bumped me up to a full-time position.
Around May of 2007 we started looking for a house to buy. After a lot of craziness, we did end up buying a house at the end of July. The house is bigger, the yard is smaller, and, on the whole, it's far less rural than what we set out to buy but I think we're pretty happy with it. It's blue and around four blocks from campus allowing Britt and I both to walk to work.
Currently, I still work at the Beloit College Bookstore where I am a supervisor. I spend much of my time at the bookstore helping customers, making certain that the staff stays busy, and shelves stay lined with the books that folks want to read. I do, of course, pay a little bit more attention to the Fantasy/SF section but then we all have our vices.
When I'm not at the bookstore I usually spend my time reading books or comics, watching movies or TV, or playing and/or designing games.
If you're interested in the day-to-day goings on in my life, I infrequently write about them in my blog Deconstructing Infinity.