Ballister’s background is technical writing for engineering and regional planning. He recently retired from a regional planning agency where he produced technical reports and grant documents. His undergraduate studies in earth and physical sciences preceded a change of majors for a degree in commercial art. Three years with the US Army provided a wealth of access to personality types as well as personal insight into well run and badly run organizations. An early working career in engineering and project management was rounded out with a master’s degree in urban and regional planning.

A longtime resident of North Florida, Bruce has enjoyed the outdoor attractions that rural Florida has in abundance. He has lived in Tallahassee since he moved back in 1990 after trying out Houston and suburban New Jersey.  He has bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Florida State University and is a proud Seminole.

Throughout this career track, science fiction maintained its position as the most likely genre that he would select when reading for pleasure. Second and third choices were suspense thrillers and history. His literary heroes are Vonnegut, Asimov, Clark, Heinlein, Herbert and Bear. Throw in the plot mechanics of Michael Connolly and John Grisham and you can see he likes a good plot twist. With these factors supporting his efforts he tries to build characters with depth and stories with an opportunity for the unexpected. He has three Sci-Fi books out and is working on a fourth.

Welcome to the Zipper Club is Ballister’s first foray into writing non-fiction for publication. It is personal and delivered in a casual conversational tone with inevitable side-trips into the technical side of medical science. It is not intended for the professional community, but to inform prospective patients and their support teams of what to expect from the recovery period and possibly how to add decades to their lives by modifying the habits that led to their coronary disease.

His latest fiction offering, Room for Tomorrow, is a time-traveling Cli-Fi thriller that explores a future gone wrong and proposes alternate courses to our current headlong rush to the precipice of climate disaster. Reviews have called it grim, but, that's the truth of current projections most of us would prefer to ignore. Our heroine and her new partner meet envoys from a destroyed planet and together take on corporate and institutionalized agents of destruction in a desperate and dangerous attempt to change course, and in a small room that shares space with a ruined 2214, try to make Room for Tomorrow.