I know what you’re thinking,

Man… look at that guy. He looks like he has everything figured out.

Well you see Dearest Reader, I make up things quite regularly, so it’s pretty easy to be this confident when all you need to do is design a few languages from scratch, create a new yet familiar mythology, describe make believe architecture, and explain how magic works…. it’s all easy.

I’ve been creating stories as long as I can remember and it’s always been my favorite thing to do. Naturally I began with pencil and paper, and I clearly remember writing a 10-page short story in elementary school about a boy, his beautiful black horse, and the grey horse that the black horse fell in love with. Naturally there was a rock slide and one of the horses got killed- because even in fourth grade I was all about the gut-punch.

My parents soon got me a typewriter, (those of you too young to know what that is, bless you), and I used it (i.e. complained) so much I soon graduated up to a typewriter that had a magical DELETE button on it where if you hit the incorrect letter, it would slap a tiny bit of white-out over the letter, covering it up so you can keep typing. It. Was. Glorious.

I wrote about a warrior with a huge battle axe, I wrote about my cat running away and having an adventure, I wrote an X-Men fanfiction story centered on Rogue because of course. I wrote about everything!

Anyway- life happened. Sports happened, as did theater, friends, girls, all of it. My writing was inconsistent but I would often dabble. I wrote and directed a 2-act play as I was leaving High School- a dramatic piece about two lovers who grow up together, and then one of them moves on while the other doesn’t. My strength was dialogue, and much of the audience was sobbing by the end. Comments like “I never thought I would cry during a high-school play” filled me with a completely unfamiliar fire and I remember driving home alone just screaming after that show I was so happy.

I tried my hand at some longer prose, writing about gangsters, and ghosts, vampires, and elves… and sometimes gangster vampires and sometimes ghost elves- but I could never finish anything. For one reason or another I would lose confidence and abandon each project. I remember once I was a solid ten chapters into a gangster vampire story and then I found the Game of Thrones book (this was years before the tv-show came out) and I couldn’t type out a single word again for months because I felt nothing I could ever write would hold a candle to the mastery that G.R.R.M. had put onto paper.

Then, one day I started to learn a bit about computer programming. The phrase, “Hello World” is traditionally the first phrase a beginner programmer will create a process for and have a computer program regurgitate. It’s a simple program, and meant to bring levity to the daunting task of programming. Something about the phrase stuck with me though, and over the next two days I wrote a single scene about an robotic artificial intelligence taking over a person’s home. The short story ends with the A.I. revealing itself, standing tall in the kitchen with arms stretched outwards and saying, “Hello World”. I shared the short with some friends and a small Sci-Fi fan community and people loved it. I think I really needed that bit of validation, because it gave me the fuel to write my first novel, Omega Children.

I didn’t really market Omega Children. I posted about it on social media a bit and it had a nice little run, and for a first attempt at a book, I am proud of it. You’ll see the reviews are mixed. Some people loved it, others didn’t like the concept any (of note, a gentleman who was the head of I.T. at The White House said it was the best Sci-fi he’s ever read, so, that’s a tally in the win column.)

I made some mistakes with Omega Children. The concept is sound, but some of the writing I look back on now and wish I would have done differently. Also the ending really leaves a few things unsettled- so maybe one day in the future I’ll go back and add a few chapters and round out the whole thing as it should be and then re-release it. But for now, it’s still a really fun book with (for my money) is still the realest depiction of how Artificial Intelligence would actually develop.

That was quite a few years ago though- and I’ve kept myself distracted with a number of non-writing projects, including writing a few comic books and having stories in some anthologies, but here I am, back, and focusing on this craft I love, and I’m so happy you’re here with me.

-Slade