BIOGRAPHY: RICK ALAN RICE

I have been writing for publication and pay since the late 1960s, first as a high school stringer providing reports on local sporting events for my hometown weekly newspaper, and then as a paid columnist and reporter on my university newspaper before embarking on a career that has extended on for more than 30 years.

In 1976, after attending one year of graduate school at Ball State University in Muncie, I took a job as a reporter with a small circulation daily newspaper in Winchester, Indiana. For the next seven years, I worked for a variety of commercial publications as a news reporter, feature writer, and managing editor, primarily in Boulder and Denver, Colorado.

I moved to Alaska for eight months in 1983-84 to work on a writing project, then in May 1984 moved to San Francisco where I took a job at Viacom, which at the time had the cable television contract in the city. While working as a telemarketing supervisor for Viacom, I traveled to South Carolina and Washington to write hospital case studies for a fundraising consultant, Gerald Panas and Associates.

In 1987 I married Joanne, a Vallejo native who I met while we were both working in San Francisco.

Between 1989 and 1992 I worked on staff at The Bay Group (now called BayGroup International) developing classroom materials and behavioral profiling tools. The firm provided customized negotiation and contention management training programs for Fortune 100 companies. In 1992 I began working as a consultant editor and continued my relationship with The Bay Group while also taking on other clients. I started in the Architecture and Engineering (A&E) industry in 1994, working first on a contract basis with Mill Valley landscape architecture firm Royston Hanamoto Alley & Abey (RHAA), then as director of marketing. My chief responsibility there was writing proposals.

In 1995 my daughter Gillian was born. My son Griffin came along in 1997.

In 1997 I became certified in technical writing and worked for a time at IKOS, then a Cupertino-based chip emulation and testing firm. In 1999 and into 2001 I provided contract technical writing services to Legacy Marketing Group, a Petaluma-based developer of annuity products, for whom I delivered a two-year program to develop company-wide procedure manuals and on line help systems.

Between 2001 and 2005 I worked in the A&E industry, doing proposal and project work for Bechtel Corporation in San Francisco, URS Corporation in Sacramento, and Shaw Environmental & Infrastructure in Concord.

In 2005 I joined Innovative Technical Solutions, Inc., a Walnut Creek-based international engineering and construction firm, as a proposal writer.

My family and I live in Benicia, California, where we own a home. Joanne runs her own interior redesign business, Room Rehab. The kids go to school in the public school system.