Michael J. Ciaraldi is a retired computer scientist, roboticist, and playwright. His stories have been published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine in the anthology Crimeucopia: Great Googly Moo!, and online. His plays have been performed in Boston and elsewhere. Mike lives in Shrewsbury, MA with his wife and Daisy, a chihuahua.
People sometimes ask me how I got started in writing. In my more than 70 years on this Earth, I have accumulated a lot of experiences, and they have all contributed to where I am today.
I started reading when I was young. My mother loved to remind me that I got my first library card at the age of five, making me the youngest patron of the Irondequoit, New York Public Library. I worked my way through their science fiction collection, but also enjoyed history and biographies. At home I had a complete set of Tom Swift and Rick Brant books, and my brother had many of the Hardy Boys series. We also had encyclopedias and dictionaries, and I used them all.
I have also been interested in live theatre from an early age. I remember seeing Jean Kerr's Mary, Mary with my parents when I was about 10. Then we saw Neil Simon's The Odd Couple, and I even remember who starred in it: Don Ameche as Felix and Oscar Levant as Oscar.
At college I got into comic books and my interest continued for many years. At one point I had one of the largest privately-owned collections in the country, over 60,000 items. I eventually donated them to the special collections library at Brown University, where they are known as (no surprise) the Michael J. Ciaraldi Collection.
After college I got involved with the new field of personal computing. I was one of the founding members of the Rochester Area Microcomuter Society, and edited their newsletter, Memory Pages. But I never got involved with writing fiction until much later in life.
Even before I started teaching at WPI, I used to attend theatre presentations there. One thing I especially enjoyed was New Voices, the annual festival where all the plays are written by members of the university community.
In 1999 I was hired to teach Computer Science at WPI. Eventually I decided to write a play and submit it to New Voices. It was called First Date, and actually grew out of an idea I had back in college. Somewhat to my surprise, it was accepted by the judges, and the students staged it in April, 2002.
Over the next 20 years, I had nine plays presented on-campus in New Voices, including several in a series about my character Summer Cum Laude, College Detective. We even put on Captions at the Arisia science fiction convention in Boston. I was also voted into the WPI chapter (called a "cast") of Alpha Psi Omega, the theatre honor society. As a member, I was eligible to participate in their annual Twenty-Four Hour Show. There we would gather for dinner one Friday evening in December. Casts would be chosen. Then teams of playwrights would spend all night writing, while the tech crew started building the set. Early Saturday morning the scripts would be turned in and rehearsals began. And at 7:00 pm Saturday the show would go on. I co-wrote a total of six plays with some very talented students and alumni.
Meanwhile, I continued teaching Computer Science. I got involved with the WPI's new first-in-the-nation Robotics Engineering program; I taught courses and advised student projects. I was part of the team which won $500,000 in the NASA Regolith Excavation Challenge. Eventually I even taught the Playwrights Seminar, where students create plays for submission to New Voices. Full circle!
I had wanted to get into writing short stories. To get a feel for what was currently being published, I subscribed to the four Dell genre magazines: Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, and Asimov's Science Fiction.
In AHMM I saw that every issue had a Mysterious Photograph Contest. The editors challenge the readers to send in a story inspired by the photo, with two restrictions: it can be no longer than 250 words, and it has to include a crime. The best entry would be published in a later issue, and the author would receive $25. After writing a few stories, in 2015 I got into the rhythm of writing and submitting at least one story each issue. I was lucky; one of my first stories, "Blurry," was published in the July, 2015 issue; that was my first professionally-published piece of fiction. Since then my stories have won this contest two more times, and several others have received Honorable Mention.
I continue to write in the science fiction and mystery genres, with some success. Several of my stories have been published on-line. In 2024 I finally placed a story, "Film Blank," in a paperback anthology; I adapted it from my play of the same name.
I am also writing plays and trying to get them published. For more details, see the links at the top of the page.
In 2019 I retired from WPI. I currently live in Shrewsbury, MA with my wife and Daisy, a chihuahua.
A note on tools: I write my stories with Microsoft Word 2021. I write my plays using professional script-writing software, Final Draft. This is all running on Windows 10, with occasional use of Linux. An indispensible tool is the Submission Grinder, which tells me about potential markets and lets me keep track of where I have submitted stories.