Ryan Schow's Blog

WordPress is an award-winning web software, used by millions of webmasters worldwide for building their website or blog. SiteGround is proud to host this particular WordPress installation and provide users with multiple resources to facilitate the management of their WP websites:

SiteGround provides superior WordPress hosting focused on speed, security and customer service. We take care of WordPress sites security with unique server-level customizations, WP auto-updates, and daily backups. We make them faster by regularly upgrading our hardware, offering free CDN with Railgun and developing our SuperCacher that speeds sites up to 100 times! And last but not least, we provide real WordPress help 24/7! Learn more about SiteGround WordPress hosting

WordPress is considered an easy to work with software. Yet, if you are a beginner you might need some help, or you might be looking for tweaks that do not come naturally even to more advanced users. SiteGround WordPress tutorial includes installation and theme change instructions, management of WordPress plugins, manual upgrade and backup creation, and more. If you are looking for a more rare setup or modification, you may visit SiteGround Knowledgebase.

SiteGround experts not only develop various solutions for WordPress sites, but also create unique designs that you could download for free. SiteGround WordPress themes are easy to customize for the particular use of the webmaster.

Recently some of my readers have asked if any of the events in my books have come from real life experience. Writing a series about genetically modified teens means the answer a lot of the time is “no.”  I simply have an amazing (if not twisted) imagination.  Of course, there are in fact many incidents in my real life that I can draw upon for inspiration, so I thought I’d give you one.  There is one particular “event” I drew very heavily upon for a scene (one of my favorite scenes in Swann!!), and that was the food fight scene.  Even now I’m grinning to myself, and saying, “Holy cow, what was I thinking?!”

I think it was probably 1985 or 1986 when it happened.  I was in seventh or eighth grade and I hate to admit to what I did, but I’m going to anyway.  By and large I was a good kid, but on that day in grade school, I decided to launch an apple across the gym at this real a**hole who had been bullying me.  Now if I did that today, in these times, you might have some choice words for me (I’d have choice words for myself!) and I’d probably need a lawyer to get me out of jail.  But back then…not so much.

First, let me set the stage.  Our gym/cafeteria was basically a giant square building with tables lined along the outer edges leaving about thirty feet of bare hardwood floor between the tables.  So, like I said, I lobbed an apple across the gym at the kid bullying me.  The fruit exploded on the table right in front of him, causing me and my friends to burst into laughter.  Even as I was laughing I remember being terribly nervous inside, but that’s because I was in a new school and bullied from the get-go, not only by this kid but by others, too.

Then something came flying back.  And then something else.  And then another table joined in and pretty soon all the tables were involved.  The air in between the tables became a gigantic rainbow of just about every kind of edible thing you could imagine. The food started hitting all around us.  Whatever you can think of – sandwiches, coke cans, a potato pancake, a burrito – it all came raining down in fits of chaos. We stood to run out of the cafeteria because things had definitely gotten out of hand and that’s when I was hit in the back with a pint-sized Styrofoam cup of vanilla shake.  It exploded into my hair and had me laughing pretty good (yeah, I totally deserved that!).

That day, the food fight was all anyone could talk about, but the next day I was sitting in the principal’s office being forced to explain why I did what I did.  It didn’t matter what my explanation was…what I did was wrong.  Naturally I spent a week in detention and not another word was said about the food fight, but that was definitely one of the highlights of my youth, something I was quite excited to write about in Swann.

A writer writes not because he wants to, or because he’s trying to accomplish something; he writes because he has to, because the very act of it consumes him, because he has things to say and stories to tell. Since writing my first story in the fifth grade, a Halloween story that shocked the entire class and my teacher into a sort of stunned silence (yay!), I’ve dreamt of living the storied life of a career novelist (a successful one, not the “packaged soup for every meal” kind—been there, done that). In 2006, I published my first work of fiction in Writers’ Journal, a short story titled “The Messenger,” and now I’m thrilled to be writing novels full time.

Although writers’ philosophies are seldom topics of discussion, how a writer thinks and what they hope to accomplish weighs heavily in whether they produce a chart topper of a novel or a sour potato. For me, when I began writing, I did so with a singular mindset. My goal for every book is to create dynamic characters my readers love and love to hate, write bigger than life stories with grit, texture and absolute character honesty, be unpredictable and funny, and pen that which has not already been penned so that the book stays with you long after you’ve turned the final page. As for the Swann Series, I believe that—with but a few exceptions—origin stories are always the best, so my goal with the Swann Series Novels is to make each new book as much of an origin story as I can, which works great since the genetic modification of human beings sits front and center to this series.

On a more personal note, I grew up reading Stephen King and Dean Koontz (and don’t forget the enigmatic Dr. Suess!), but about ten years ago I fell in love with the early works of Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club, Survivor, Choke) and Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho, Glamorama, The Informers), and the writing styles of those authors deeply influenced my own writing style. I’m also a fan of the Marvel and DC Universe, and movies like Lucy and I Am Number Four and the Resident Evil series. When I find the time, I read around a hundred books a year, both from established authors and from independent authors on Amazon’s Kindle platform. I love to be entertained, so my inspiration comes from everywhere: the books I read, the television and movies I watch, the fringe subjects I study, my crazy college years, my insane career working in the highly irreverent, wildly unapologetic world of sales and marketing, my ten years of practicing and teaching karate (I have a second degree black belt in the Okinawan based Isshin-ryu system), and my absolute, nearly obsessive love for tricked-out Audi’s.

For those of you who are new to my work and want to contact me, please do so! I’m easy to reach (my facebook page and my website are the best places to go) and I love connecting up with people who have similar interests in both life and fiction. Until we meet, I’ll be in super-sunny California enjoying my life with my beautiful wife, my two little ones and my badass Audi. And of course, chances are pretty good that at this exact moment, I’m hard at work on my next novel, so keep an eye out for that and definitely keep in touch!

One of the most frequent questions I’m asked by my readers is this: “Why is love so difficult for Savannah?” And I’m like, “What, and take the easy way into love? That’s not dramatic enough, realistic enough, difficult enough!” Conflict is the answer. Great stories are chock full of it and resolution for the hero/heroine should never come easy.

One of my early mentors once told me, “Write an amazing character who has the world against her, but make sure your readers love her because of who she is, how she views life, and what she can become, and then drag her kicking and screaming through the deepest most disastrous pits of hell before giving her what she wants most. And even then, don’t make it obvious which way she’ll go because you don’t want the reader figuring it out a hundred pages before it happens.” There is struggle in life. And unpredictability. Why shouldn’t we have this in great fiction as well? This is still the best advice I’ve ever received on writing.

So the premise with every love element I write is that it’s complicated and impulsive, and in matters of the heart we make mistakes, read signals wrong, take a U-turn when she should have gone left. This was my high school love life. But not in a fun way. I went to four high schools in three years, and honestly, I couldn’t seem to find the right social circle until my last year of high school, but by then it just felt odd being me. In terms of dating, I made plenty of mistakes, missed some opportunities, almost fell in love once or twice, but it never really caught. I think my more devoted readers will understand. I never felt truly safe in my own skin in high school, or in my first years of college for that matter, and these experiences have a way of working themselves into my stories. Sometimes not feeling sorted out in life means not feeling balanced in love either. Such is the life of the Swann Series’ Savannah Van Duyn…

To answer my readers’ question, in these novels, the struggles of first love act as more of a driving force than a central theme. Granted, for our heroine, there are a few frogs to kiss, some princes to breeze on by as they’re drooling, and that one question of self-discovery I’m convinced most people might never fully answer: If I don’t have a choice at who I want, but I want them anyway and don’t know it, will I ever truly fall in love? Okay, so maybe that’s not everyone’s question, but sometimes it’s the questions we don’t know to ask that effect us the most!

As a writer, if I can strike that perfect conflict, if my characters can teeter on the razor’s edge of either coming together or falling apart long enough, one gets that sense of the story being more true to life than a simple three-act fairy tale where Boy A falls in love with Girl B and through some conflict and a catalyzing event they come together for that happily-ever-after ending. This ain’t that book! Not by a mile.

I work my fingers to the bone and my brain into a squeezed-out sponge for that glorious emotional investment from my fans! I want my readers to root for the right person while watching everything go astray. There should never be an easy payout. Sure a character might get there in the long run, but I don’t want my fans thinking things will pan out a certain way. Sometimes, I almost want them giving up hope. But only for a second. Then, when things come together, they do so in exciting ways you never really saw coming and this is the big payoff! Writing stories like this, crafting fiction to that measure, is pure joy for me. In my mind, this is great story-telling, and in many ways, this is what the romance element of this series is truly about!

If your parents love you enough to erase you, who would you become? This is the question that haunts sixteen year old Savannah Van Duyn, but it’s the answer that nearly drives her to the brink of insanity. The idea that an ugly duckling of a girl could rely on genetic modification to solve her body image issues is the central theme that launched the epic Swann Series novels and turned one girl’s extraordinary story into a novella, seven full length novels and an eighth novel in the making.

For the past fifteen years I’ve had an obsession with genetics and the inner workings of the human mind, specifically where we impose our own sets of limitations. The best sales pitch we ever ran on ourselves is this: “I can’t do that.” This thought keeps us from attempting the impossible, driving through failure to find success, growing as people in all walks of life. Part of my curiosity of stretching the mind and body came from my many years in martial arts. There were so many things that we did at first that felt impossible, but then one day we were doing the impossible and that sort of wakes you up to the world of infinite possibility. Then I watched Scarlett Johansson’s epic movie LUCY and I was like, holy cow! The concept instantly resonated with me.

The other part of my intrigue, and truly the driving force behind the more chilling aspects of the series, came from reading the case study of Cathy O’Brien some 20 years ago. O’Brien claimed to have survived and escaped the brutal CIA-funded mind control program called MK ULTRA. Her story was like nothing I’ve ever read before. MK ULTRA was a program from the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s that was so inconceivable and so horrifying to the average American that it would’ve fallen under the heading “conspiracy theory” if not for the overwhelming amount of evidence dredged up in the Church Hearings on the abuses of the CIA against unwitting US citizens. There are a few things that move you in your life, that really change you at a DNA level, things that claw open your eyes almost against your will, and O’Brien’s story was one of them. Out of this single case study, whether it was true or not, the conspiracy “enthusiast” in me was born.

In the Swann Series, I set out to give readers something more than vampires, werewolves, angels, demons and the dystopian landscape. I was obsessed with the idea of crafting something new and exciting. A series like this is captivating and a bit scary because a lot of the underground science in the books is not so underground anymore. To me, the greatest fiction always incorporates truth into the fiction; if my readers had any idea how much of these stories are rooted in fact, their minds might actually crack. For me, intertwining truth with fiction was one of the most exciting literary devices I used in crafting this series. It also presented some weighty challenges. How do you incorporate some pretty intense characters and subject matter into a series and still make the story fun, intelligent and relevant to today’s youth and times while being mesmerizing, a bit creepy and ever so thrilling at the same time? The short answer is, it’s delicate. The long answer is slightly more detailed. It takes great characters plus character growth and development plus plot movement all working harmoniously with each other to drive the story through layers of conflict and conflict resolution that ultimately bring you to that satisfying, unexpected outcome. Say that five times fast!

In upcoming blogs, I’ll touch on some of the more emotionally-charged elements of the books and how they shaped the stories, namely body image issues, bullying, cyber-bullying, familial relationships, our obsession with pills to solve our problems, etc… I also delight in the more controversial and disturbing aspects of this series and how they’ve become front and center not only in Hollywood and literature, but in today’s scientific advancements.

In the mean time, I hope you’ll pick up your copy of Swann and let me know what you think! If you want to stay in touch with the latest developments or join in the discussions of the series by me and readers like yourself, just head over to my facebook page, www.facebook.com/ryanschowwriter and press the LIKE button.