Buck Paiva (a.k.a. D. A. Buckster)

Buck Paiva is a professional computer programmer with nearly three decades of experience. He is currently a Systems Architect at Peppermill Casinos, Inc. in Reno, Nevada. The title basically means he gets to design the applications that he will eventually have to code and implement.

Art

Buck has dabbled in drawing since he was a child. His earliest memories of sketching were of the Suzuki logo (his father had a Suzuki motorcycle). From aliens and skulls to snowboarders, Buck has doodled in his leisure for decades.

He did some very rudimentary graphic art with his on-line comic strips, Punc & Mark and Grey Matters, and the promotional images for the first strip.

Only recently, in 2015, has he taken up painting. Let’s see where it goes.

Writing

Buck has been writing off and on since he was a teenager; mostly poetry, song lyrics, song parodies, and goofy things with which to entertain his friends. It all started around age 10 with plays he wrote and starred in with his siblings, and performed for his parents.

In the late 90’s he wrote several radio ad scripts for a local chain of computer stores (back when those things still existed) and two of them eventually made it to air.

During that same period, he created and self-published an on-line comic strip about two emoticons in cyberspace (Punc & Mark), then followed up with a strip about the failed alien invasion on Earth (Grey Matters).

Around 2004, he started writing short stories. His stories were mainly influenced by the classic television series The Twilight Zone, and so rarely had a happy ending. He shared his stories with friends and family, and posted them for download on his personal web site. He gave them away freely and never gave serious thought to getting published.

Then in 2012, he went out on a limb and joined the Unnamed Writer’s Group (now High Sierra Writers). Since then, he has joined two of the associated critique groups and has gotten more serious about the craft. He has given a presentation (Creative Stealing) to the organization, and has since been named Director of Membership.

On a side note, Buck does not typically speak of himself in the third person. But he made an exception for this bio page.

Artiztik

So why Artiztik? Well, over the course of his life, Buck has been told that he is very imaginative and creative. Artistic was a good synonym, and lent itself well to an alternative spelling. Plus, there was already both a creative dot com and artistic dot com. (Did you know Artistic makes chain link fences? Seriously.)