This is the author website/blog for Michael D. McCool. It is a work in progress, but will ultimately serve as an index to content I’ve created scattered around in different places, and a place to post news.
I been a lot of things over the years, including a researcher, an entrepreneur, and a web standards developer. Some of the content I have created over the years may not be interesting to everyone. If you’re interested in my fiction, you probably don’t want to read my research papers on stratified sampling or on security models for semantic IoT. My plan (WIP) is to index everything here eventually, but to organize it all by categories, focusing on my most recent fiction work.
Sites
I also have content on other sites, including the following:
Royal Road: Short stories and web serials.
Substack: Essays and news.
Facebook: News, daily commentary, and pictures of cats.
LinkedIn: Business contacts and shameless self-promotion.
Instagram: Pictures, usually things I also post on Facebook.
The above links are to my profile pages. In most cases I will link to specific articles and stories in other places, e.g. the “Essays” categories below may link to articles on Substack. Content that doesn’t fit anywhere else (e.g. poetry) I may occasionally post on this site as blog articles or pages.
Content
The following pages organize content by category.
Essays: Short non-fiction. Includes both magazine articles and online essays.
Stories: Short, self-contained fiction.
Serials: Regularly updated long-form fiction that may or may not continue indefinitely, and that I may or may not publish in book form someday.
Novels: Long fiction, book form, finite. Every novel is self-contained, but may also be part of a series.
Other: Non-fiction books, research papers, and standards.
Biography
I have lived in the United States, Japan, and Canada, but am currently based in Canada. I have a B.A.Sc. in Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, where I studied computer graphics and biomedical engineering. I was an associate professor at the University of Waterloo in the CS department, but spun off part of my research into accelerated and massively parallel computing as the company Rapidmind. I served as Chief Scientist for Rapidmind until it was acquired by Intel, then worked for Intel for many years on distributed and parallel computing, robotics, and AI topics, as well as web standards around the internet of things, chairing the W3C Web of Things Working Group for almost ten years. Since leaving Intel in 2025 I have been writing full-time.