While injuries and a noticeable lack of any marketable skill kept Robert Scott from a career in Major League Baseball, the northern Virginia teacher still looks forward to February each year in case the Boston Red Sox find their organization at a loss for a short, old, slow third baseman with poor fielding skills who enjoys Austrian beer and William Faulkner novels.

Born in New York, Scott grew up in New Jersey as the second of four children - his three siblings have all gone on to enviable greatness and periodically send a few dollars to help their wayward brother make the rent. The son of a homicide investigator, Scott recalls looking forward to dinner conversations, especially on evenings when company was invited, because most nights included at least one story of grim, true-crime, death or dismemberment that would have made poor Ellery Queen or even Travis McGee whimper.

Leaving New Jersey for central Maine, Scott attended Colby College where he majored in music and was awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to study and perform for a year in Europe. Focusing on the guitar works of British composer Sir Lennox Berkeley, Scott returned to the US in 1991 in hopes of finding a Major League Baseball team in need of a concert classical guitarist with knowledge of obscure English music. Tragically, all those positions had been filled, and Scott moved to Boston where he taught music and began working on a graduate degree in Whatever They Might Be Offering.

Also in 1991, his car was involved in a minor accident - he was inside making dinner at the time - with a number of other vehicles in a Boston parking lot. Hurrying outside in a burgeoning rage, Scott calmed when he discovered a young, attractive, well-educated, professional-looking woman examining the damage to his fender. Stuttering badly, Scott learned that her name was Karen, and while she did not agree to marry him that night (she had fled the scene when he offered to back up and hit her car again, just to make an impression) the two were wed in 1994.

Moving to Colorado, Scott took a job as a public school teacher and completed a doctorate in Education at the University of Northern Colorado. His dissertation, a qualitative investigation of high school principals and role-related stress, won wide acclaim . . . well, local acclaim . . . all right, his mother says she enjoyed it. The thesis did go on to sell thousands of copies, however, to families in need of a good doorstop or luxury yacht captains interested in mooring their vessels in deep water harbors.

In 2002, the family moved, with their two children (both with strong pitching arms), to northern Virginia where Scott took a position as a high school administrator. In the wake of his dissertation's wild, international success, Scott continued writing but turned now to fiction. When he received word that his first novel, The Hickory Staff, Book One of the Eldarn Sequence would be published by Victor Gollancz, an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group, Scott missed much of the telephone conversation, because he was so busy searching for a good place to fall down. One of the details he missed was that his editor expected two sequels on a fairly tight schedule - within the hour was negotiated down to sometime tomorrow afternoon. Scott has spent much of every day and night since then chained to a desk in his basement scribbling book two, Lessek's Key, and book three, The Larion Senators, due from Gollancz during the summers of 2006 and 2007, respectively.

Today, Scott teaches special education at a local middle school when not juggling the demands of parenthood, writing, complaining about the coffee at a local diner and leading China to democracy. He is an avid runner who, discounting the nearly 15,000 who finished ahead of him, actually won the New York City Marathon in 2003. His short fiction has been featured in collections and journals in the US and Canada.