Me with caribou horns in Anaktuvuk Pass.

Click HERE to Select and read, on your own schedule, any of the 10 short works of speculative historic fiction, formatted in PDF, in Jerry's spring 2023 release titled:

Cassiopeia's Quest - Revelation There is no charge to read these stories, but they are copyrighted with all rights reserved, so please resist the temptation to copy them. The stories are also available for sale in either a paperback or ebook collection format on Amazon.

However, If you are feeling adventuresome, Click HERE to listen to a TEST of my NEW AI read-out-loud PROTOTYPE of my 2018 short story titled: COLLAPSE. My AI Reader, Lilly, reads the story with Australian flavored English. I hope you enjoy this new listening experience. But be aware. By the current settings, it will take Lilly 54 minutes to read the story aloud. You can control Lilly's reading time by speeding it up or slowing it down by clicking the three vertical dots to the right of the story's timeline, then choose a different speed. To stop the reading, click the 2 vertical parallel lines to the left to pause, then right click on the background behind the timeline to get a menu, then click Back to return to the opening page of the Jerry Smetzer web site.

Hello. Welcome to our DEV Web Site.

Some of our favorite travel images are in a slideshow. To see the show click HERE.

Several of our favorite images are organized by year.

To choose pix from the years 2010 to 2023 click HERE.

To choose pix from the years 1993 to 2009 click HERE.

NOTE: Page displays for favorite personal Drawings and Paintings organized by medium are under construction.

At this writing in July, 2024, my Current fiction project is a full length novel about the struggles of a middle-class family with kids living and trying to build their businesses in modern day north Florida.

Now that the work is completed on my collection of 10 short pieces of speculative/historic fiction in book form (See book covers above) I have released the completed version in spring, 2023 under the continuing title Cassiopeia's Quest - Revelation.

The stories in this newest release were set in motion in an earlier version of the collection, titled Cassiopeia's Quest, published June 2018, in time for my mother's 100th birthday. In all our releases since June 2018 the stories remain the same, basically, but we focus on character development, plot and story telling rather than rely too heavily on summary, background and context descriptions to carry the story, as we did in our earlier releases and by so doing discovered the hard way why dialogue and human conflict is always better than description. In my limited but hard earned experience reading or hearing fiction - or any kind of overuse of description and summary and under use of character, event, environmental detail and plot - is unsatisfactory as a story telling experience.

As we have done in each book released since the first 10 years ago, These 10 stories and their 10 young female protagonists each help to define and illuminate the evolving culture and hard-won humanity of the species known as homo sapiens. Our descent from the closed and fruit-laden environment among the enfolding trees in the tropics to a harsher, more open, more challenging savanna makes us who we are. The chronology in the 10 stories is long; ...from a resting place for nomadic hunter-gatherers in the east African Savanna 100,000 years ago to a commercial crab boat crewed by women in the Bering Sea Crab fishery sometime in the near future. Their boat, the "Aleutian Challenger" is working far to the west far off Alaska's northwest coast. They are north of the Aleutian Chain near St. Paul Island.

Click this link HERE. It will take you to an 8 minute YouTube video with the paintings, protagonists and story lines at the root of each of the 10 stories I have written for Cassiopeia's Quest, and Cassiopeia's Quest - Revelation. Each of the 10 stories in the November 2018 release and the Spring 2023 release are also available for reading as online .pdf files. I am also attempting to convert each of the stories to be read aloud, on an experimental basis using Artificial Intelligence. The first of these, Collapse is available for listening to the story as read aloud by my artifical Reader, Lilly, with an Australian accent, by clicking the second HERE at the top of this page.

Cassiopeia's Quest and Cassiopeia's Quest - Revelation are both available for purchase on Amazon in an eBook format downloadable into a Kindle reader for $5.50; or in paperback with no imagery for $18.50. An illustrated version of Cassiopeia's Quest with 12 pages of full color maps and illustrations - released in June 2018 - is also available on Amazon for $15.00. A few "near new" copies leftover from earlier print runs of these volumes will also be available at $5.00 each whenever I sell books at a Public Market. Click HERE to connect to my book page on Amazon. When you click on the book's cover you can learn more about Cassiopeia's Quest and Cassiopeia's Quest - Revelation. You can add the book to your cart, and then purchase by following Amazon's standard procedures for payment and shipping. We support independent book sellers and local printers so the books listed above are also available as paperbacks through local book sales venues and outlets in Juneau and Skagway, Alaska. Wider distributions to independent book sellers around Alaska and across the U.S. are in the works. With enough advance notice and some help with travel I am happy to take myself, the books and some research notes and images on the road for public presentations and book sales.

My Business Venture.

I am retired, so my work day is mostly spent writing, editing and book promotion and selling. When possible I do some drawing and painting for relaxation and therapy, with some digital media and small systems design client projects thrown in to spice up my workdays. Gardening, reading, teaching, potlucks with friends, and planning trips to visit children, grandchildren, siblings and extended families around north America round out my social life. In other words, mostly, I am a lucky guy with more than my share of things to be thankful for. My mom, for example, passed away quietly and fully lucid in April of last year at age 104. Shortly after, in June, her oldest great granddaughter (my oldest grandchild) graduated highschool and is now a first year student at a great private college in the east. At this writing it is two weeks before Thanksgiving 2022. We are in the third year of the Pandemic with, so far, no COVID. With so much good fortune, all the preceding statements are even more heartfelt.

Click HERE to link to my business web site, Small Systems Design Associates. We are based in Juneau, Alaska, USA. ALL RIGHTS ARE RESERVED.

Small Systems Design Associates built the original Small Systems site, and this original site during 2010. We did a major technical upgrade, redesign, and rebuild of the Small Systems site in 2012, and then rebuilt this site in May, 2014. All the original source files with the most recent updates were destroyed in a computer/network/HDD crash; the site was then re-installed from backup onto rebuilt equipment on 5/22/2017. This page was re-designed and updated 12/3/2018 and 5/30/2023 to reflect the re-issue of Cassiopeia's Quest - Revelation as Edition 1 under a new ISBN# and newly redesigned cover. The stories remain the same as in the release of June 2018. Writer, painter, science enthusiast and web site designer and developer Jerry Smetzer has now begun work on a full length novel. Wish him well. Any bookreading enthusiasts out there with an interest in doing some alpha or beta editing of chapter drafts in my novel, please let me know..