While there, I met this month's Dream Chaser - Jared Garrett. At the time, the only thing I knew about him was that he was published through the same house as my good friend, Kevin Nielsen. Caught up in the rush that is LDStorymakers, we selfied.
Because it was a must.
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| Still loving that filter, Jared! :) |
Don't we look amazing?
It wasn't until after the conference that I was able to read some of Jared's work. I read both Beat and Lakhoni and - I kid you not - once I finished reading, I immediately messaged Jared to beg him to be a Dream Chaser. He, of course, graciously accepted my invitation.
I may have fangirled a little in the process.
But just a little.
All jokes aside, I've added Jared to my list of favorite authors and I'm hounding him for more books to read because I can't seem to get enough. He is dedicated, talented, and simply amazing.
Keep an eye on this one. He's going places and fast.
Jared Garrett
I grew up in a cult.
See, writers are told to lead with a solid hook. Did that
one work? Not enough? Okay…
I was born and raised in a cult
that splintered off of Scientology, in Oxford, England, in the 1960s. The
cult demanded total fidelity and kids were distractions to that fidelity—at
least for a while. So many of the cult kids, I call us cult orphans, were
essentially grouped together and tended to by some random member of the cult.
Usually that random member was an acolyte who didn’t have much skill with
walking the streets of Chicago, New Orleans, London, or New York and
fundraising for the cult’s various causes.
So I grew up in a sort of orphanage. By the time I was
eight, I had found out who my father was—yes, he was a member of the cult. By
the time I was eleven, the cult had several branches around the USA and all the
kids were shipped to the Dallas branch, where the cult, now called the
Foundation Faith of God, had started what they called a private school. But it
was basically homeschool because the students consisted of me and my fellow
cult orphans.
I had a mother and a father—but I really didn’t know what
that meant. And that was the norm for me, so I didn’t really see it as the
issue I do today. We were neglected, abusively disciplined, ignored, sometimes beaten,
left on our own for hours, and taught to march. We were shipped off to the
cult’s huge animal sanctuary ranch in the red desert of Southern Utah every
summer for two months, where we lived in tents (checking our sleeping bags
nightly for scorpions), dug miles and miles of trenches for water supply pipes,
built cat and dog pens, snuck sodas from the huge walk-in cooler, scooped dog
poop for ten hours a day, framed houses, put up drywall, roofed houses, and
lots more.
And the leader of the Dallas branch was imbalanced, to put
it generously. She could be very sweet at times, then become a raving,
emotionally abusive pseudo-mother/warden the next moment. She was my enemy. I
couldn’t stand her, although she taught me to make bread. She also taught us
songs in support of the IRA, had all the kids sing a few songs at a Dallas
gathering of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
I left the cult when I was seventeen.
This is all important to my writing and my writing dreams.
Why? Because I was a voracious, desperate reader. I read every single fantasy
book in the Dallas library branch I could ride my bike to. But that was the
level of my desperation for emotional connection and release. Nobody around me
cared about me, but when I was in stories, I was making friendships, fighting
dragons and dark elves and possessed sorcerers, riding beautiful black horses,
losing my best friend but gaining a father, and lots more. Stories opened my
mind and heart and gave me a place to escape to from the bleak, often painful
place I lived in. When I was reading, the abyss of loneliness and isolation I
felt beckoning me was beaten back. Stories, and later poetry, were the source
of truth and goodness and beauty that I most often turned to. I learned much of
what I know today by reading great stories. Fantasy and science fiction stories
as well as what many people term the classics. Black Beauty. The Yngling.
The Icewind Dale Trilogy. The Riddlemaster of Hed.
Bridge to Terabithia
shattered me and I have never recovered, because in the midst of the painfully
tight throat and tears, I thought, “What is happening to me? I’m crying like an
idiot. But I love it. Wait, what if I could do this too? What if I could write
stories that made people cry, but love it?”
So I began to write. I wrote short, silly stories. I wrote
half-novels freehand in notebooks, copying the styles of Robert Ludlum, Stephen
King, Mercedes Lackey, Patricia McKillip, Douglas Adams, and Susan Cooper. I
wrote poetry and self-published the most uneven, ugly chapbook of it. Maybe
three of the forty or so poems in that chapbook are pretty good.
In 2007, after several years of inconsistent income from
teaching, my wife and I decided we would refinance our home and take out some
cash, then live on that cash while I worked to build a solid writing career.
Mostly with freelance writing, but working on my novels on the side. It went well,
but never turned into something we could live off of. I wrote nearly 1000
articles in that time, starting and maintaining three websites with a variety
of content. I wrote five complete novels from 2007 to 2011. A publishing
contract with a global education publisher failed after six months of very
frustrating work. The company a friend and I tried to get off the ground came
crashing down after about a year
Then came 2014. I’d written and re-written many times a
novelization of ten years of my life in the cult by the end of 2013, but 2014
started off with a bang: my wife had kidney cancer. We’d found out through the
most extraordinary, humbling, terrible, awful miracle imaginable: her pregnancy
with our 7th child wasn’t acting normal and an ultrasound indicated
it might not work out. And it also found the huge tumor on my wife’s kidney. We
lost the baby, surgery happened fast, and by the end of April, she was clear
and recovering from the surgery. Our lives had changed, because life had become
more precious. The hits kept on coming in 2014: I was laid off from my job of
four years and my last grandparent died.
So I decided it was time to stop waiting. I sent my cult
childhood novelization to agents. The rejections became specific: great
writing, amazing story, don’t know what to do with such a raw, unique voice
that sounds like YA but also sounds like adult contemporary fiction. I vented
to my wife a lot, then decided to heck with it; no more waiting. I’d taken
control of my day job career, becoming a unique Instructional Designer with
skills maybe ten other instructional designers in the country have. So no more
waiting became my catch phrase. No more waiting for anything; it was time to
take control of my writing career too.
I hired an artist, the excellent Nathan Shumate, to do the cover and
typesetting, did one final detailed revision for voice, then worked through a
deep copy edit. Beyond the Cabin, was self-published
on Dec 1, 2014. My first novel. In print.
I held a launch signing at the wonderful Pioneer Book in Provo. It went better than I
had any right to expect. My friends and family turned up with smiles, hugs, and
money in hand. Reviews came in: people loved the book. Next, Beyond the Cabin was nominated for a Whitney Award.
All of this was possible because of one thing: work. Having
the resources to hire a cover artist, then order copies for sale and signings,
and to go places to sign the book—that was all possible because I had a day job
that I was committed to doing well. It wasn’t just a bide your time thing—it
was a career. And I worked at it and worked at building it so it would support
my family and enable the writing career. On top of the day job career, I was
writing daily. Or at least mostly daily. Sometimes a break was needed. I had to
learn to allow myself to take breaks for mental, emotional, and physical
health.
The main thing is that I treated writing as not a hobby—but
a job. My dream job.
I figured I would build on the success of 2014 and started
working at Amazon in April of 2015. No, I can’t help your book be an Amazon
bestseller. I’m a training guy—not a sales guy. Two weeks after moving to
Seattle, I signed a contract with Future House Publishing, an independent Utah
house, to publish my YA futuristic scifi thriller Beat. Beat’s a cross between
Goonies, the Hunger Games (without kids killing kids), and Speed. Dave Butler
called it “the apocalypse of fitbits.” The story takes place in a world 100
years after 95% of humanity was killed by a bio-toxin they call the Bug. The
Bug is incurable and unkillable. It attacks the heart when it is above 140
beats per minute, killing a person within minutes. In order to keep people safe,
the surviving society, called the New Chapter, created wrist computers called
Papas that not only monitor the heartrate, but administer a powerful sedative
called the knock-out if the heartrate hits 140. The Papas do a lot more than
that too, by the way. Fifteen year old Nik Granjer grew up with a Papa on his
wrist. It knocks him out every night at 10:30 for sleep, and any time his
heartrate gets too high.
But Nik hates the Papa. He’s spent his life trying to find a
way to block the knock-out. Aside from that, he doesn’t believe the Bug is
still a danger. How could a bio-toxin still
be in the air after 100 years? After finding a way to block the knock-out, he
decides to prove to his friends that the Bug is gone by pushing his heartrate
past 140. One night, he rides his bicycle through a park as fast as he can. His
heartrate hits 160 and he doesn’t die. His friends are stunned. The Bug is
gone.
On the way home, Nik and his best friend Bren race, with
both of them blocking the knock-out. Bren gets hit by the Bug, dying within
minutes. When the Enforsers, the police of the New Chapter, show up, Nik tries
to explain. Maybe he’s immune! But they immediately try to kill him. So he goes
on the run. With his friends’ help and through betrayal, capture, escape, and
total stubbornness, Nik uncovers a generations old secret that could destroy
the rest of humanity.
Doesn’t that sound like fun?
My third novel came out in January. It’s called Lakhoni, and is a fantasy revenge
thriller inspired by Incan and Aztec culture. It’s about a young man named
Lakhoni who is left for dead when his village is destroyed. He crosses the
kingdom to hunt down and kill the man responsible for his family’s death: his
own king. On the journey, he trains with then escapes assassins, finds love,
and learns that his family might have been traitors to their own people. And if
that’s true, he’s the only one who can save not only his kingdom, but all of
civilization.
This is the kind of book you read when you need to
decompress from normal life and go on a crazy adventure, but maybe you don’t
have any climbing equipment.
I’ll be putting my next project, called The Seer, up on Kindle Scout in the next couple of weeks. It’s an
urban fantasy about the fulfillment of a Hebrew legend called the Lamed
Vovniks, or the Thirty-Six. It’s about a grieving, lonely graduate named Nathan
who finds the ancient cloak of Joseph. You know, that guy who was sold by his
brothers and ended up basically ruling Egypt? The cloak gives Nathan powers of
perception into people’s hearts and he has to use the cloak to stop a cursed,
crazed terrorist, while dodging an assassin from a shadowy cabal that wants the
cloak for its own purposes.
The sequel to Beat is
called Push. It’s done and I hope to
get it released this year. I wrote it on the train I ride during my commute to
and from work. I had to fight for elbow space several times. Sometimes, I would
get so into the scenes, I would get off the train and sit on a bench at the
downtown train station to finish. Then I would walk to the office and get to
work on the day job.
I did this every workday for two months. I wrote at night
and on Saturdays as well. It was exhausting in all the right ways. And Push is easily the best book I’ve ever
written. I’m working on my next series now, having a blast exploring a world
and characters I’ve been thinking about for about three years. My dream is to
work as a writer, living on my writing and supporting my family with it.
That dream isn’t something I’m chasing anymore. It’s
something I am working for every day. Every word I type. Every time I push past
exhaustion and open my laptop and write or edit. Every agent I query. Every
book I sign. Every person I talk to. Every business card I hand out. Every book
I read. Every day. Every day. Every day.
I’m working my dream job right now. One day, my dream job
will be my only job.
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