I was born in the frozen paradise of Alaska and grew up in the thriving metropolis of Chugiak. I was a strange little kid (not much different as an adult) with a vivid imagination. From an early age, I picked up reading and enjoyed it enough to keep doing it. It wasn’t until I saw the Rankin/Bass cartoon of The Hobbit in 1977 when my reading interest exploded. The next day after it aired on TV, I headed to the closest book store, The Book Cache, in Eagle River and bought a copy of the book. I devoured it. And then I devoured all three The Lord of the Rings. But I couldn’t get enough. I even raced through the Silmarillion in my desire to take in more of this fantasy stuff. Not long after that, I’m not sure when, a desire to write my own stories blossomed.
Throughout high school, I made several attempts to put story to paper. I would get a few chapters in, get frustrated, and then start over in an attempt to make everything perfect. I couldn’t. I would then give up for a while until the urge overcame me again and I’d try something new but with the same result. I managed to get a few short stories written but the novel eluded me.
Music took over my creative side for several years, propelling me to college where I eventually got a bachelor’s degree and then a master’s degree in music performance and pedagogy from BYU in Provo, Utah. I married an angel, graduated from college, and moved back home to Alaska for a while. I occasionally made attempts to write but working, teaching, and raising a family took up most of my time. Besides, whenever I did write, I ran into the same problems I had when younger.
Several more years went by and we moved our family back to Utah. By this time, I had a teenage daughter who also wanted to become a writer. Since I at one time had also had such aspirations, I thought that this could be a good daddy-daughter bonding experience if we did NaNoWriMo together, or National Novel Writing Month. We both started our stories though I had no plan on what I was going to do.
The main goal of NaNoWriMo is to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. This was hard for me at first because I had no story in mind and whatever I did write, I wanted to go back and ‘make perfect’. Fortunately, trying to do that many words in those few days means you can’t go back and fix everything. I had to learn to accept what I’d written, warts and all.
And what I had was a royal mess. There was no plot to speak of and the writing quality was so-so at best. But what I did have was a fascinating world and interesting characters. I took the vomitous mass of words and slowly, over two years, hammered them into a coherent story. It took a while to come up with a title but I finally settled on The Dragon War Relic.
Cedar Fort, a local publisher, was having a conference called 6-7-8, meaning that it took place on June 7th, 2008. I decided to attend the conference and pitched my book there, describing it as like Harry Potter getting a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. They liked it, they accepted it, and it was published.
After that, I wrote Time Gangsters, a middle-grade fantasy adventure. I then had a novella accepted by a new company called Big World Network. It was Delroy Versus the Yshtari, a sci-fi comedy. They also accepted my comedy series about a teenage boy in a fantasy kingdom who came to possess some magic socks called The Tales of Myrick the (Not So) Magnificent, Volumes 1 and 2. I’ve also had a few other Myrick, as well as a couple of steampunk/Western, short stories published in a few anthologies.
I’ve got several other projects in the works right now. I’m polishing a fantasy/Western, the third and fourth Myrick volumes (coming soon to Kindle Vella), a superhero novel, a YA sci-fi, and I’m now brainstorming a story that is kind of like Jason Bourne in Back to the Future meeting George Washington (or maybe King George III?).
I have come to the conclusion that I am a writer and I can’t deny it. I love writing and I am so much happier when I’m working on stories. Stories help us describe so much about the human condition and help us learn how we can deal with the trials that we face daily. We are the heroes in our own stories. Can we pick up the sword and conquer our dragons? Yes. Yes, we can, because stories have helped us learn what we can do.