About
Gerry MacOstair
Born on 23 August 1968 in Vienna, Gerry is an Austrian freelance writer and web designer. He lives and works in his home town.
Gerry fell in love with the power of words very early in his life. At the age of five, he started to teach himself to read and write. Patience was never his forte. He did not want to wait another year until his formal education would eventually commence.
Soon he realised that he felt lost without words. His enjoyment of reading had developed into an addiction. For years, he wouldn't leave the house without carrying at least one book with him. Today, however, he sometimes wished he were illiterate, especially when he opens the morning papers.
Gerry is often asked what he thinks about writers and writing. His own approach was best described by the National Book Award winner of 1976, William Gaddis. In his acceptance speech, Gaddis said this:
I feel like part of the vanishing breed that thinks a writer should be read and not heard, let alone seen. I think this is because there seems so often today to be a tendency to put the person in the place of his or her work, to turn the creative artist into a performing one, to find what a writer says about writing somehow more valid, or more real, than the writing itself.
William Gaddis (1922-1998), American novelist
When he's not writing, Gerry designs and builds functional furniture and websites, takes photos, plays volleyball, rides his mountain bike, and is enslaved by two merciless cats.
This Website
This website is the recommended starting point to explore Gerry's creative universe. It's powered by sNews, a very lightweight and flexible Content Management System (CMS).
Gerry has been a staunch supporter of web accessibility and standards (i.e., the attempt to provide each user with the same quality of information, regardless of personal limitations or equipment used) for years.
He designed these pages to be as accessible as possible. If you still encounter barriers, please do not hesitate to inform him via the contact form.
This website's visual content (text and theme) is Gerry's. The scripts to run this website were created by several members of the sNews community. (For further reference, follow link at the bottom of this page.)
Jones, Matt Jones
Several useful features of this website were gracefully coded by Matt Jones, a damn fine code monkey hailing from beyond the pond.
Those Incredible Icons
The nifty icons spread all over this site were created by an extraordinary talent yonder in Japan, Yusuke Kamiyamane.
MacOstair Creations
MacOstair Creations is not a company as such. It's more of a label — an umbrella term to introduce and describe everything digital Gerry is creating and publishing: eBooks (PDF and ePub), websites, on-line articles, photographs, prints, etc.