about me

Writing and reading colleagues:

A few months ago, my e-book became available on amazon.co.uk. I was pretty excited since many of the people who reviewed and helped me here on authonomy were based there.

In the meantime, I've published myself using createspace and my book is now available in print. YAY! please visit my website www.urtaru.com to learn more. I'm working on book 2, and I've actually loaded it up here, and just hit the authonomy minimum number of words yet. Please stay tuned for more...

I wish you all the best.


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My name is Armen Chakmakjian. The first part of my name "chakmak" is the word for Flint in several middle-eastern languages. Currently I'm a Manager of Product Development at Intuit's Platform as a Service Group (PaaS-G) managing Intuit QuickBase and the Intuit Partner Platform

My main reason for being here is that I've written a Sci-Fi novel and published it on Kindle and I'm here to learn more about everything.


Here's a few things about me:

* I love gadgets, whether electronic or a swiss army knife
* I play the guitar
* I teach Sunday School in the Armenian Church
* I like a nice glass of wine with my dinner
* I'm working my way to an MBA at Bentley U.
* I went to RIT and got a degree in Computer Engineering
* I graduated from Fairfield Prep
* I've worked for Digital, Teradyne, Lakeview and Intuit
* You can find me on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Wordpress

My favorite quote of all time, which I need to paraphrase now because I've lost the original text, was attributed to Admiral Spruance after Midway. It goes something like "Historians will write that this event or that choice made the difference here or there. While you're there though, it's a hell of a lot of groping around in the dark". When I first wrote this I forgot my other favorite quote which is a bit more serious: “Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for, I have grown not only gray, but almost blind in the service of my country.“ which was said by George Washington, putting on spectacles for the first time in front his officers in 1783, while reading a note from Congress about their back pay about which they were talking rebellion.

I'm a fan Star Trek, Monty Python, The Prisoner (Patrick McGoohan), and Sean Connery James Bond movies. I've thoroughly read the works of Jorge Luis Borges, like some of Umberto Eco, and think that Frank Herbert was the greatest SciFi writer. I think the greatest single work of human literature is Lord of the Rings (I place the Bible in a different classification). I love reading biographies of famous cranks of history like John Adams, U.S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Winston Churchill...People who were out of place in their time and sometimes viewed as eccentric or difficult.

My favorite band of all time is the Doobie Brothers. After that the Eagles, America, and a host of other groups and artists who played a guitar to make music and not just bang on it or play a million notes because their fingers can do it.

So being this quirky, religious, technology, semi-musical, Monty Python, Star Trek, Patrick McGoohan Prisoner, minority ethnic type, I’ve written the first book in trilogy. (You can read more about my plans for the sequel in one of the posts on my blog)

In my particular case, it’s a book that throws together most of those things (I leave the Monty Python out). I based it roughly on the stories that my father told me about my grandfather who made his way through the Middle East and eventually to the US. It’s a science fiction novel that pits the the space equivalent of the Russian, Persian and Turkish Empires, with a planet roughly equivalent to Armenia in the middle.

The inspiration for the trilogy are the stories my father told me all my life about my grandfather and specifically the ones that I forced him to tell me while he (my father) was dying from cancer. My grandfather was an exceptionally talented individual who seemed like a superhero in the family, even if he was never really James Bond.

The first book takes my grandfather’s character through a series of James Bond-esque situations. There’s a “Gates of Vienna” type siege broken by something like Jan Sobieski and Knights Templar kind of mashup. There’s an eschatological 3 generation prophecy and a couple of religions. I’m a bit romantic and steeped in my father’s stories of Arabs, the Israelis and the British, and particularly the British, I’ve worked the archetypes into the story. Of course being Armenian descent, you also have the Russian, Persian and Turkish influences. So you add that all up and you get a conflict.

favourite books

Urtaru :-)
Ficciones - Jorge Luis Borges
The Cornish Trilogy - Robertson Davies
Dune - Frank Herbert
Lord of the Rings - Tolkien
Failure Is Not An Option - Kranz
Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant
Truman - David McCullough
Forever War - Joe Haldeman
The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
The Writer's Art - James J. Kilpatrick

my websites

http://www.urtaru.com/     http://mynamemeansflintstone.wordpress.com