I’m a lifelong fantasy reader. I was introduced to the genre at a young age via Greek myth and Arthurian legend (If you haven’t read TH White’s Once and Future King, I envy you the adventure). My parents read me Lord of the Rings as a wee lad and I was hooked. I read every fantasy book I could get my hands on. I grew up without a TV in the late seventies and eighties (wasn’t missing much then) so reading books fought with time spent outside. Walking through the woods, I’d imagine elves hiding in the leaves of the tallest oaks while goblins readied an ambush from behind the darkest brambles.
I was just popular enough to learn insecure people believed pretend was for nerds. Why read a book, when you could watch Dukes of Hazard? The TV did all the hard work for you. I wondered what was wrong with me. Why could I fall so deep into a novel that others couldn’t find the energy to crack? It wasn’t until years later that I began to feel sorry for them and what they were missing. I’ve mostly switched to ebooks, but even today the first thing I do when I open the pages of a new hardcover is smell it. That paper and glue combo redolent of the adventures of childhood, getting lost in a foreign land without ever leaving my perfect blanket fort.
The only thing which came close in the real world was science. Science offered a promise, a key to the secrets of the universe if you could only learn the language. Real magic. So I got a degree in physics. I even started a PhD into the far stranger worlds of quantum physics when I ran into the stark reality of career choice. I didn’t want to be a professor. I didn’t want to teach. I have nothing against teachers, but I wanted to create worlds. So I used the coding skills I learned to build physical models and turned it into a coding career. Ultimately, that included building video games and starting my own companies.
Everything came to a screeching halt when I was diagnosed with cancer in my late twenties. It was one of the good ones, Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, which is kind of like celebrating your number coming up late for the draft for Vietnam. Anytime you have to have conversations about survival rates, it’s gonna be a shitty party. I was starting my first company and I was engaged to a super intelligent, thoughtful, gorgeous, empath of a woman who had just started medical school. Looking back, I’m thankful for the experience of being a cancer survivor, but at the time it felt like punishment for things going my way. Like I had somehow angered the gods I refused to believe in. I will say that dread, pain and existential self-reflection does wonders for priorities. I made bargains with myself during that time, like most due when forced to face our mortality. Coming out the other side made me a bit of a discipline freak when it came to making and holding commitments.
I wrote my first fantasy novel during that time as a way to jump in to an escape pod to somewhere, anywhere, else. I didn’t do anything with it as I was still building my career. I wrote another novel five years later which I self-published without knowing a damn thing about self-publishing. That went as expected. I think I made $114 from that experience, but it was never about the money. It was about getting lost in another world and this time it was my world.
This time, I found a way to tie in some of the pain of those experiences and more importantly how much one can grow when facing that pain. That’s where the Evolution Trials comes from. I’m also a little older, grayer and more secure that I wanted to try to really get it out there. See what people thought. I took the time to find people to help me do the hard work of editing, learning how to market a book and the creating a kick-ass cover. I hope you enjoy my work half as much as I enjoyed writing it.