On the Fifth Book

My fifth book is one that I've already discussed fairly often on this blog, and hopefully it will be the one I publish this December.

Wolfhound was a new experience for me in a lot of ways. With the exception of my aborted Star Wars fanfiction early in my attempts to write, virtually every story I had done had been fantasy genre. In fact, I had never really considered writing science fiction after that, even though a lot of my favorite authors wrote in the genre.

I guess in large part the decision to change things up came from the condition I was in at the time. My writing on Brellan's story had kind of stalled a bit, and I hadn't worked on Jakeson's book in months--almost years. It had not been the best of years for me. Graduation had kind of ended my time at BYU with a whimper instead of a bang, and our move to Houston had not turned up the opportunities that I had been hoping to find. Rejections from medical schools were coming in fairly regularly, and I began to question whether that was the type of career I wanted anyway. All in all my outlook on life was...well, let's just say it wasn't good and leave it at that, okay?

So in the middle of feeling a little lost and confused, I remembered something from my teenage years when things were, needless to say, better. It was kind of an obscure memory, but it was what I needed to have at the time. I had written a talk for church and it went fairly well. My dad had asked to see the paper I had written it on when we got home, so I gave it to him and walked into a different room. When I came back I remember my dad looking up from the page and saying to someone else "This is why he should be a writer!"

Not much of a memory, I'll admit, but my dad has something of an effect on me at times. I decided that since he had always been there for me before, I might as well give it a try as long as everything else was crashing and burning.

Starting out, I hit on the idea of writing a story about a hero along the lines of Captain Moroni. That kind of story would have to be science fiction, if only because fantasy doesn't fit that kind of character as easily from my perspective. The next idea was to have it on a ship modelled after the USS Constitution, a ship that has always kind of captured my imagination. With a name like 'Old Ironsides' how could it not? Bit by bit, the pieces came together for me, and I had the idea for a story. Jacob Hull's introduction to heroism and war was a pretty standard action adventure story, but I worked hard on it, and if I do say so myself, it turned out pretty well. Of course, once it's on Amazon you should probably buy it and find out for yourself... heh heh heh.

So that's the background on the fifth book. If only the sixth book had gone nearly so well... See ya!