Truck Shot

Jim Stinson was taught writing at Harvard and media at UCLA, and has done both ever since.

On the writing side he started early, publishing “Restorations of Elizabethan Public Playhouses,” but was soon downsized from Academe, which is probably just as well. After an interlude of earning a living, he wrote four Stoney Winston Hollywood mysteries, Double Exposure, Low Angles, Truck Shot, and TV Safe, which were published by Scribner. Today they are available from Smashwords, and from Lulu.com. His mainstream novel, Tassy Morgan's Bluff, was published in Summer, 2011 by The Plume Books imprint of Penguin. In 2012 he published his first Smashwords original, The Princess and the Firedrake.

On the media side, he’s made everything from feature films to instructional gems like Electrical Hazards in the Coronary Care Unit. Today, he works constantly with media to keep abreast of ever-changing hard- and software.

Combining writing and media, he was a columnist and contributing editor at Videomaker magazine for 12 years. In 2001, Goodheart-Willcox published his college and high school textbook, Video: Communication and Production. A revised second edition was rebranded Video: Digital Communication and Production, and a third, massively updated edition was released in 2012. Yet another major update is scheduled for late 2015.

He has, over the years, returned to the classroom, teaching film production at Art Center College of Design, Media history and criticism at California State University Los Angeles, and video production at La Canada High School, La Canada, CA.

Though born and bred in Pittsburgh, PA, he has spent all his adult life in California and Oregon, where he now lives with his wife, Sue. He dotes on his two children and is pleased to report that they remain at large.