I grew up in a small town on Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay. It was quiet, there weren’t many kids my age at school, and I turned to books to fill in the blanks on my personal map of the world. In seventh grade a friend lent me The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien and it changed my life. Until that time, I’d never read a fantasy book. It was like opening an unexpected door in my mind and nothing was ever the same.

Bookstores became my favorite place to be. My father built me a wall-covering book shelf just to hold them as I read everything I could get my hands on. Dad called them my ‘flaming sword’ books from the rather fantastical covers that many had.

Once I started working full time after school, I began transitioning from reader to dreamer. I soon discovered that creating my own adventures was as much fun as reading other’s. I could, did and do spend hours following every twist and turn of the story. Enduring every moment with hundreds of characters and their consequences, both magnificent and horrifying, as they follow their dreams or run from their nightmares. It became an almost private compulsion to then go back through the stories looking for any flaws or logic fails in my pursuit of the perfect story.

Of course, creating a story, then making it the best it could be, was only the beginning. I then had to write it down and this became my most difficult challenge. Throughout my education, I’d treated writing as just something to get through. It never dawned on me that those rules, those phrases that so captured my attention in a well written book, would not just appear once pencil was put to paper. I could see every story and every scene perfectly in my mind, but translating from that image to the written word is an adventure all of its own. And it’s a journey that takes far more time than I ever calculated.

It took me two years to write the first draft of Deceptions of Powers. It then took me another three years to make it somewhat match the perfection in my mind. Every change and edit I made to DoP meant that the future books in the series I’d already created had to be edited and adjusted accordingly. This first book in The Young Master series is a serious fantasy thriller set in a dark medieval setting. Powerful magics, blind ambition and horrific cruelty are just some of the themes threaded through the characters lives.

I’ve now become old enough to have grandchildren and my desire to inspire them to read has lead me to put on hold (temporarily) the second book from The Young Master series and create a story set in our own time. The Guthrie Hayden series is for those who might look at me and think ‘old’. Lol. The lighter threads of fate and choice are my contribution to inspire them in their own lives. Regardless of tone in either adventure, it’s my hope that the readers feel the dedication the characters have to their goals, their principles and ultimately themselves. Win, lose or draw, the characters and my readers can claim like the famous song, they did it their way.