Earl is a freelance audio/video producer currently working in northwest Arkansas. He started working on the LogBook – originally a simple Star Trek: The Next Generation episode guide – during his senior year of high school, and it began circulating on such early pre-internet bulletin board system networks as Fidonet. The earlier web presence for the LogBook was established in 1995, and the project eventually landed at its present home, theLogBook.com, in 1999. And it’s still here.
Earl created and co-hosts the Gene-ology Podcast for Roddenberry Entertainment, examining the body of Gene Roddenberry’s TV writing work _outside_ of Star Trek. He also continues in his duties as editor and technical producer of Mission Log: A Roddenberry Star Trek Podcast and its sister shows, Mission Log: Prodigy and Mission Log: The Orville, for Roddenberry Podcasts. He is also a frequent writer, editor, and voice on the daily Sci-Fi 5 podcast for Roddenberry, and handles streaming and video production on Mission Log Live, Mission Log: Prodigy and Mission Log: The Orville. He also serves as the technical director for the successful TrekTalks online telethon events benefiting Hollywood Food Coalition (see the 2022 and 2023 events on YouTube), and handles similar duties for the Nichelle Nichols Foundation‘s Hailing Frequencies Open series of online events. (And he’s available for hire for other projects of this type.)
From his home base at theLogBook.com, Earl produces his own projects as well, including writing, producing, and hosting the podcasts Retrogram, Select Game, and Don’t Give This Tape To Earl. He produced the Phosphor Dot Fossils video game documentaries released on DVD in the late aughts, and on YouTube, still occasionally produces and hosts the ongoing Phosphor Dot Fossils and Voyages Of Shelf Discovery video series. (theLogBook sites and ongoing media projects are entirely listener/reader/viewer supported via Patreon and Ko-fi.)
In the late 1990s/early 2000s, Earl was a staff writer for Classic Gamer Magazine and wrote video game reviews on a freelance basis for All Game Guide. He has written several books covering Star Trek (WARP!1), Doctor Who (VWORP!1 and VWORP!2), and a memoir, Fatherhood, Fandom And Fading Out. He served as a fact checker for Benbella Books’ Boarding The Enterprise anthology (2006, edited by Hugo- and Nebula-winning authors Robert J. Sawyer and David Gerrold with Leah Wilson). He also consulted on and provided material and memorabilia to the short-lived Sci-Fi Channel series Sciography, for an episode about the acclaimed SF series Babylon 5; and was the DVD content producer and remastering specialist for Packrat Games’ The Odyssey² DVD. He has also created cover art for audio drama CDs, label art for homebrew video game cartridges for the Atari 2600 and Odyssey², and was a frequent exhibitor at the Oklahoma Video Gaming Exhibition.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Earl worked at a variety of local television stations in Arkansas (KPBI, KFDF, KHBS/KHOG) and Wisconsin (WACY) in both creative and technical capacities, learning to combine both specialties, sometimes with surprisingly good (and even award-winning) results. He took the lead in devising WACY’s Prime Time Invasion sci-fi/genre programming block in the late ’90s, helping to make that station one of the ten fastest-growing affiliates of the (now defunct) UPN network in late 1997. Prior to his television career, he got his start in local radio.