Meet the Mind Behind the Words: My Journey as an Author Begins

In a following post I will explore the writing process of The Long Walk Home: When the Power Dies, but here I want to explain who I am and how I came to write a novel.

Ever since I read The High King by Lloyd Alexander, The White Mountains by John Christopher, and Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper, each the first in a series, I have wanted to write a book. I had been a voracious reader before that, but those three books really got me thinking about how much fun writing a book could be. That was when I was around 11 to 13 years old.

I kept my interest in writing but never pursued the actual process outside of academic papers. I wrote for my high school paper my senior year and wrote a lot of papers through college. My first paying writing job was after I left graduate school for the Nautical Toys Boat Club and their franchising manual. From that point on I would pick up different writing projects, sometimes as a part of a job and sometimes for a single paying project. I wrote business analyses, grant applications, press releases, and many other projects. Eventually, I helped co-write the first edition of The Search and Rescue Merit Badge for the Boy Scouts of America. Later I was a reporter for a local newspaper. It seemed like every time I wrote I was using a different professional style. All these different writing experiences varied from engrossing to automatic, yet always in the back of my mind was the desire to write an entire book.

But what kind of book? In college I studied ecology, history, and political theory. Would it be one of those? How about a book on finance, outdoor emergency response, or outdoor leadership? Those are the different career paths I pursued as an adult. The writing itch had never really been about any of those things for me, even though I enjoyed all of them. The itch was to write fiction, some type of speculative fiction, and I decided to sit down and write a book. After several floundering attempts I finally found a story that I could finish.

While writing The Long Walk Home my greatest challenge wasn’t the writing itself. Once I got going I was able to write quite a few pages a day. It was the sitting down and eliminating the distractions and beginning to write. I enjoy a lot of hobbies, and I try to do them well, I am also a husband and father, and I try to be a good member of society and so I volunteer my time. Each of these present all sorts of legitimate and not-so-legitimate sources of distraction, not to mention how easy it is to allow yourself to become distracted by books and, especially, the internet. But I was motivated and had a wife who was supportive and helped me remain committed to my own goal.

When I was a middle school student I thought that writing a story was going to be fun, and I was correct. What I didn’t know was how long it was going to take to start writing the story, nor did I know how much of a challenge it was going to be to wade through the distractions to experience that fun. I look forward to a lot more fun times as I write stories to entertain you and challenge you. I will be writing for young adults and adults in the future. The next couple of books will continue to follow Tommy, the main character in my first book.