#IndiesOfChristmas

I grew up in a town in the Midwest. My mother was a bookkeeper for a small HVAC company and my father was a draftsman. At university, I studied chemistry. However, when I graduated, I did not (or could not) pursue that vocation because I was terrible in the lab.
I have been a storyteller ever since I can remember. It started as a way to get out of trouble and evolved as a way to entertain those around me. My first recollection of writing prose was in elementary school when I had to write a short essay about a picture from a magazine. (Mine was a freshly baked loaf of bread.) In grade 7, I penned two short stories for a school writing competition. One was entitled “My Funny Cousin”, a descriptive piece about a relative (a little older than me) who stayed with us one summer. My mother very quickly killed that story. At the time, it didn’t make sense to me because she told me she thought it was very funny. It was only later that I figured out that I could have replaced “Funny” with “Flamboyant” in the title. So, it was back to the drawing board. My second attempt was a collection of anecdotes about the life of my maternal grandfather titled “The Hilarious Things My Grandfather Did”. That one went on to win.
Apart from contests and making my way through school a little easier, I found that writing (especially creative writing) had other uses. In school, I was the proverbial class clown. One time a teacher told me, “One more pun out of you Overttun and you’re out the door!” To which I replied, “O pun the door!” That earned me a string of one hour detentions that would end on completion of a 1,500 word essay on any topic of my choosing. So, I chose the great outdoors. It was a story about a lumberjack. It went sort of like this, “Jack the lumberjack was a lumberjack. Everyday, Jack the Lumberjack would go out into the woods to do what lumberjacks do best. They chop trees. When Jack the Lumberjack found one, Jack the Lumberjack took his ax and went chop, chop, chop, chop, chop…” Needless to say, while I met the strict requirements of the essay, it was disqualified. In its place, I penned something very wordy about getting up in the morning and going through a normal school day.
My first complete novel was a story about a soldier of fortune in the age of horse and bow. At the time, I had contact with people in the entertainment business in California. The feedback I got was that I should take one of the chapters and expand it into a novel. That made no sense to me. What the heck did that mean? How could you expand something so small into something big? So, I never pursued it. However, the comment stuck with me. It was only much later that I figured out that it meant that I should never rush the telling of a story.
This brings us to the present and the Terra Nova Series. (Book 2 has been published and Book 3 is in progress.) I write for an audience of one: my wife. She loves the stories.