Even as a child, I knew exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up: an astronaut, a baseball player, and a pirate. By my early teens, the goal had changed to architect. Then, by high school the plan was to become a lawyer. That goal persisted through college, where I earned my BA in Criminal Justice in only 2.5 years.
Two years of law school later, I decided that the law wasn't for me after all, and took a job with a certain Big Blue computer company. That association lasted for 35 years, followed by 5 years (so far) with the biggest PC/laptop vendor. Although I enjoyed creative writing while in school, I never envisioned making a living as a writer.
Life has a funny way of taking its own path, however. In one of my many jobs within that behemoth of a computer company, I found myself writing hundreds of technical database articles (describing how to do this or how to diagnose and fix that). My work was praised to the point that I eventually compiled that and other information into a series of online books in 1989 (long before PDF), and made it available both internally and externally to customers.
Next, I decided to try my hand at writing a printed book. The result was the "OS/2 Power User's Reference: From 2.0 through Warp 3.0", published in December 1995 by McGraw-Hill. Unfortunately, it came out right after Windows 95's debut, which pretty much killed the market for the OS/2 operating system and OS/2-related books. The book is still listed on Amazon.com, although long out of print.
Undaunted, I decided to try fiction writing, but couldn't come up with a worthy project at first. In 2000, I took at stab at the children's picture book market, writing "With a Name like Jeremy Hippenzoodle".
My next project was a novel. Most writers would have started small, with short stories, and worked their way up. But not me. No, I had to start at the top. Ha! It took until 2003 before I decided to finally sit down and just do it. (Sorry, Nike.) From the first day to the last, including significant editing along the way, the first draft of "The Tesserene Imperative" (TTI) took all of 69 days to write. And it was brilliant, right? Double-Ha! But it had potential. The story was sound, but the writing needed a lot of work. Over the next four years, I periodically went back and polished, expanded, shortened, and edited the thing to death, until it finally gleamed like a precious gemstone. (Well, maybe semi-precious.) Today, it has earned 4.6 stars on Amazon.
In the meantime, I wrote some short stories, humor pieces, and sci-fi poems. In 2004, I wrote my second novel, "The Mars Imperative" (TMI). (it has garnered 4.3 stars.) In 2005 I began work on the third book in the series, tentatively titled "The Galactic Imperative". Halfway through the story, it dawned on me that unless someone bought the first two books, there wasn't much point in finishing the third one. So I put it aside and concentrated on editing TTI and TMI, as well as writing my second children's picture book: "Marvin the Marvelous Mole Man".
In early 2006 I had the idea of writing a sci-fi novel about a wisecracking private detective who gets kidnapped by aliens and has to save the human race. That idea turned into "Sunrise Destiny". Then in 2007 I wrote a new novel, "My Other Car is a Spaceship", an expansion of an unpublished four-chapter novelette I wrote in 2005. It's the story of a retired air force pilot who's recruited to fight space pirates. Lots of shooting and things blowing up.
In November 2009, "Sunrise Destiny" was selected as a finalist in the 2010 EPIC Awards competition. In September 2014, "My Other Car is a Spaceship" reached #1 on the Amazon list of bestselling Military Sci-Fi books, and #4 on the Space Opera list. During that time, I was listed as the #31 best-selling sci-fi author, between #30 David Weber (one of my favorite
SF authors) and #32 George Orwell!
My latest novel, "Aliens Versus Zombies" debuted on July 10, 2015. (Since then I've been on hiatus.)
All of this definitely wasn't the path I had envisioned for my life, back when I wanted to be an astronaut and a pirate. Yet, I managed to hang onto a bit of that, instead writing about astronauts and pirates. (And who knows? Maybe lawyers too, someday.)
To find out more about my books and other scribblings, check out my blog, at http://tesserene.blogspot.com, my website at http://mtchapman-author.com, or my tweets at http://twitter.com/MarkTerenceChap.
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