Featured Author - John D. Brown! - Part 1

Whew! Cupid hasn't figured out about this area yet! I have no idea what he'd do here if he discovered this. It's bad enough he's changed a bit of the main blog. I'm just glad he hasn't changed the color scheme. Oh! I guess I really shouldn't mention things out loud or he might get ideas! You won't give any will you? We'd really appreciate it if you didn't!

I had to bring John D. Brown here after I discovered his book, Servant of a Dark God. He created an interesting world and unique characters. I'm eagerly awaiting the next installment, as are many readers!



I wasn’t destined to be a writer. Heck, I barely read as a child. In fact, I don’t think I read more than two dozen books from kindergarten to sixth grade. I look at the my daughter and the kids in their grade school and they smoke me. They’re reading machines. I was not. I do, however, remember loving the look and feel of chubby books.

I would take them up to the school librarian to check them out. She’d look down at me and say, “Are you going to read all that?”

“Yes,” I’d say.

Of course, it was lie. I did nothing of the sort. I would take them home and put them up on my dresser and just look at them. It was too much work to read them. I just loved the look and chubby feel. When it was time to check them in, I’d take them back and give them to the librarian.

“Did you read all that?” she’d ask.

“Oh, yes,” I’d say.

Yeah, me and writing—it was destiny.

It’s true that when I was in my teens I wanted to tell animated stories. I loved stop animation—Rudolph, Santa Claus is Coming to Town—loved it. I saved up many dollars working as a nursery water boy in the hot Utah summer sun to purchase an 8mm movie camera and the parts for a do-it-yourself animation stand. I was determined to make a film. But my lovely camera was crunched in a conveyor belt in the Athens airport, and, well, sometimes that’s all it takes for some teenage dreams to be set aside.

A number of years later I was twenty-one and starting my college education for real this time. Like a lot of folks, I’d considered a smattering of careers and hadn’t found what I wanted to do. But on a fine spring day I was sitting in an honors class and the professor was quoting Emily Dickinson who was saying that she knew something was poetry when it made her feel as if the top of her head were coming off. An electric jolt shot down my spine. And I knew I wanted to take the tops of people’s heads off.

Not being a serial killer, I enrolled in the English program. Of course, it was a long haul after that before I was professionally published, but I think that’s the moment when I decided to write stories.