I wasn’t always a writer. Well, not in the sense of 500 page books, anyways. I actually hated writing through High School. The soul-crushing philosophy of “Write what I tell you, not what you want” just never appealed to me. I did, however, always have this overly imaginative mind, to the point where I struggle to focus on real life. Straight out of High School, I joined the Army National Guard, and became a part of the world’s most elite team. Specifically, I became a 68W Combat Medic. I found my home away from home with my unit, and have never second guessed or even vaguely regretted this decision. In that time, something miraculous happened: I wrote one single sentence which would end up being the very first sentence in my Third Life novel. Instantly, I took my first Hiatus. Didn’t write another word further for three months. But it rolled around in my head, the many roads that one single sentence could lead. One day, I picked that notebook back up, and for a year straight, I wrote for roughly three hours every day, not taking one single day off for any reason. Honestly, it would be difficult to call it writing, for the characters took on lives of their own, and I was but the narrator. I started sharing the pieces in chapters with my friends in the military, and I’m still amazed to say they loved it. Before long, I had a whole book’s worth, and then a second, then started a third. One day, a friend came to me. He said, “Are you thinking of publishing any of this?” It all clicked. I realized I was, in fact, wanting to publish. What started out as a simply hobby to help myself and my military family pass the time (Yes, we worked hard. From dawn until dusk, every single day, sometimes much, much more) had evolved, had changed me. Suddenly my mind was able to focus during the college courses I take, as if I had finally started letting some of the creativity out to make space for learning. I sent what I’d put together out for critics (they weren’t nearly as happy with my work as my blood and military family) but I took the advice they gave, took some things out, put others in. After that, it was a process of get critics, sending the revised book out to beta readers, and repeating that same process over and over. I did that around four or five times before I was getting all the approving nods I needed to move forward. After two proofreads, reviewing a few different potential book covers and eventually selecting one, it all became Third Life: The Ten Plagues of Oluceps. Countless hours of work became one single bound series of numbered pages. Countless days filled with love and hate, success and failure, gain and loss, all those emotions helping me channel the proper feel of the story, breathing life into simple words on those pages. Countless weeks that I spent staying at home instead of going out, letting my mind run wild, painstakingly selecting which words I’d written needed to be discarded like rubbish. Countless months where I’d find myself in different parts of America, sometimes different parts of the world, seeing new things and experiencing new cultures that helped me understand how somebody like my very own main character would feel in a land that they didn’t understand. I wrote a book, but that book, in turn, created the person I am today. And now I have released that book to the world, ready and waiting for all the praise, criticism, and “bleh, can’t say I really liked or hated it” ‘s because I know that I’ll take it all in stride, reevaluate and adjust, improve and diversify, grow and overcome. Because like me, my work is guaranteed to still have flaws no matter how much I work to polish them away. But this book has taught me that I’ll never stop growing or learning, and I never want to. Well, I know this has been a bit long-winded, so thank you if you read this far. Feel free to contact me with any questions or concerns. I’m happy to give away a few spoilers ahead of book releases to those of you so interested in