H John Spriggs

Chapter 1:

 

H John always had trouble settling down. He was born on in Scotland, in a city overlooking the North Sea. He almost immediately found himself being dragged around the world, from Malaysia, to Borneo, to the West Cost of the United States. As a youngster, he spent time living in Seattle and Wichita, but he ended up doing most of his growing up in the suburbs of Phoenix in the 90s. Between bouts of avoiding the 120-degree heat, he was reading books by authors like David Eddings and Raymond Feist, watching films like Krull and Willow, playing Dungeons & Dragons (2nd edition), and wishing somebody would one day do for fantasy movies what Star Wars did for Sci-fi.

 

He also spent a little time, here and there, writing chapters of novels that were never quite to be.

 

Chapter 2:

 

Once he got out of high school (Go Toros!), he couldn't decide on a major, and so he opted not to go to college right away. Instead, he spent a few years trying various jobs out. He stocked old ladies' clothing for a man with a clothing-shop-on-wheels, sold CDs and Video at a big box store, and spent a couple of months driving an airport shuttle. He worked for his parents in Las Vegas for a couple of years and went bust. He tried to join the Air Force but had too much debt.  He tried selling cars and soon discovered he was possibly the worst salesman in the entire world.

 

(It was around this time that he finally got his wish about fantasy movies. The Lord of the Rings trilogy was incredible, wasn't it?)

 

Eventually, he found a job doing tech support for an ISP in Virginia. He worked the graveyard shift, and during the day he attended college courses and wrote the occasional extra bit of story about a young man named Caymus in a world where people worshiped the elements.

 

Chapter 3:

 

One day, he suddenly discovered he'd finished his college degree, and so he decided to seek his fortune in the UK, and he spent several more years working as a software consultant for some of London's biggest companies. That was when he discovered just how amazing trains were! See, he couldn't afford to actually live in London, so he spent many hours commuting every week, and every single one of those hours was time with no distractions: he could just sit in his seat and write.

 

Two years later, he self-published his first novel, Knight of the Flame. Winds of a Growing Storm came soon afterward.

 

Life didn't slow down after that, of course. Consulting contracts came and went, and new clients meant new commutes: sometimes there was time to write; sometimes there wasn't.  Still, he wrote as much as he could, taking spare moments where he could find them.

 

Chapter 4:

 

Two years after Winds, though, came the singular moment that changed everything: that was when he met the woman who would turn out to be the greatest love of his life. He proposed to her a year later. A year after that, they were married in a gorgeous ceremony in Las Vegas.

 

Now, after years and years of never quite feeling at home with the world, he's finally settled down in a place very much like where he started: in a city by the sea in the United Kingdom.

 

Chapter 5:

 

(The author has marked this chapter as "in progress")