Barak Engel

On the professional side, I suppose I am best known for (arguably) coming up with the notion of a "virtual CISO" - that's Chief Information Security Officer, an emerging corporate executive role - and subsequentely popularizing it (and building a business around it).

But this is the Author's Guild, so who cares, right? such a fascinating challenge, to write an author's biograpy!

Truth is, I have been writing from the moment I took a breather from reading. As a child, I could claim to being fully bilingual by age 8 or so, and an avid bookworm even earlier; for a few years as a teenager and young adult, I was reading 200-300 books a year (which indeed implies one a day quite often - probably the reason I am interested in and familiar with so many genres). Speed reading is the bomb, yo.

I took a couple of creative writing classes in college, and tried my hand at investigative journalism, even exposing a small corruption story that resulted in a student council resigning en masse. I also wrote a bridge (the game) column for a local newspaper for a little while. Later on I was reviewer, then editor, at the Games Domain Review, the world's second largest video gaming ezine, back in the 90's.

Since moving to the United States in late 1999, I had written a bunch of random pieces related to my profession which were published by trade media. I had also ghostwritten articles for my customers' executive to publish under their own names to help promote their technology and product operations, and contributed a chapter to a book that was published by Raymann Group ("the Guide to Operational Excellence").

Eventually, all of this culminated in getting my own book published by Taylor and Francis this year, which is still a bit surreal for me (as is being a member of this esteemed body).

With all that, my hidden passion in writing is actually fiction. I have written numerous short stories, a couple of novellas, and more poems than I can count. I have, on two occasions, gotten cold feet after being offered an opportunity to publish these works: (1) as a collection of poems detailing an Internet love story (back in the 90's); and (2) when I met one of my favorite authors, Orson Scott Card, at a book signing. I brought his (probably) least known books - the "how to write" ones - to the event, and he was curious, and when my response exhibited my accent, he invited me to send him one of my short stories for possible inclusion in an anthology he was working on, of stories in English by non-native English speakers. Awestruck as I was, I barely managed a thank you before walking out. I then consistently failed to follow up, which introspection has led me to admit was simply the result of preferring the invitation to the - in my mind - inevitable rejection.

So, there you go. My first author's biography. I'm sure it will improve over time.