Thanks to my grandfather, I fell in love with storytelling at a young age. I grew up listening to him tell stories about everything from backing down schoolyard bullies to his passion for my grandmother. He was a master storyteller who could repeat the same story yearly and still find a way to set the hook well enough that you wanted to hear it again.
As I grew, my love of stories found a home in books as my mother encouraged me to read often. She always said, “reading makes you smarter. It doesn’t matter what you read as much as it matters that you read.” I took her words to heart, and, after reading thousands of books, I was determined to write my own.
For as long as I can remember, I was one of those people who always said they would write a book. Like most people, the dream got bumped year after year. One year, I decided I wouldn’t be one of those people who said they would write a book any longer. I was going to be the person who wrote one.
I was determined to finish a manuscript. I didn’t own a computer, but I had an iPad, so I got to work. I decided I didn’t care if the finished product was unreadable or if it never saw the light of day; I was going to finish a complete novel. So I did. My prediction was correct; that first manuscript never saw the light of day. But I had proved to myself that I could complete an entire manuscript. Six months later, I had another completed manuscript.
That second manuscript became my first published book, The Nephilim Virus. It’s a post-apocalyptic novel about a virus that has infected two-thirds of the world and the one man whose blood holds the cure; he just doesn’t know it. The Nephilim Virus won the Readers’ Favorite gold medal for thriller of the year, and actress Megan Fox endorsed it, saying, “this book would make a great movie!”
I’m passionate about writing, and I’ve traded the iPad that carried me through two manuscript completions for an actual laptop. Most days, you can find me tapping away with the help of any number of my four kids or two dogs. In addition to the novel, my work has been published in Focus on the Family magazine, The Daily Caller, Daily Wire, Bodybuilding.com, and Fitness Trainer magazine, among others. You can also find my writings on family and fitness on my blog.
