2nd and hopefully last

Got my 2nd proof of Mendel's Release. Hopefully this will be the final/final edit, then off to publication.

Guess what?  Bear Justice is available at amazon.com in both kindle and paperback forms. Check out my author page on Amazon: http://amazon.com/author/johnsonkent 

Books to be published November 2017!!!!

Guess what? I've been off work for a month or so due to a flood. It gave me time to do some final edits an get two of my books out for publication.  I'll update with Amazon links soon. Until then, Check them out on my author website.

BEAR JUSTICE

MENDEL'S RELEASE

Words of wisdom from Jeff Sessions

It's been a long time since I wrote in this blog. One year ago I hopped on an airplane and was gone.  I came back in February 2015 to pickup my stuff and sell a bunch of crap and moved on with my life. I left the Ex-wife, many good friends, my writing group and 35 years worth of history behind. I moved to a place without and ocean: something I never imagined. I'm in the midwest, the heartland. I'm teetering on the edge of the rust-belt and rural America. So far it has been fun, if not only because there is work outside of California, but I feel like I've escaped from a lot of things that were holding me back: the effects of the recession, 7 or 8 day workweeks, the quest to find money to pay bills, the never ending search for something that isn't there--okay, that quest is still alive and well. I'm settled in but still searching and I still haven't published a book, but soon, yes, soon.

Here is a pic of my new surroundings a few minutes from home.

Why Writing ?

A lot of people know me as a biologist, but not as a writer. I'm going to tell a little history about me and my writing.

1. I've got a vivid imagination and anyone who knows me well, knows I talk to myself.
2. I can create stories and stuff for multiple persona's pretty easily.
3. I wanted to get my PhD in Plant Physiology and teach at the college level.
4. My first acclaimed story was in the eighth grade using Get Smart characters in a Roman setting.

Let me go on and talk about number 3 above and this will give an insight into my writing. Before I graduated college, I took the Graduate Record Exam (GRE), which is put out by the same people that do the SAT, only this compares your knowledge to other college graduates, not high school graduates. I signed up to take the standard test and the specialty test for biologists. You need to have the test results to apply to graduate school. I also had five letters of recommendation from five of my biology professors, including my plant phys. prof that wrote a 6 page typed letter of recommendation that was just awesome. 

GRE results: I considered myself a pretty darn good student of biology, and I still do, but...my results of the GRE were just average, which isn't really bad since I was being compared to other college graduates, but for graduate school, perhaps not enough. But another score from the GRE shocked me:

I scored within the top 4% in Reading Comprehension and in the top 6% in Verbal Reasoning. WOW. This is comparing all college graduates that took the test on that day, including those, I assume, in literary majors. I should have been a lawyer, except stealing and being a general troll is not my style. I was dumbfounded. Here I thought my skills were highest in science, and all along, I was an literary guy.

So what have I done with those skills? At some employers, I was the person to review laws and regulations and give interpretations. Reasoning has it's value in deriving something new and I've invented a number of new tests, methods and other stuff. I've done ad copy for places I've worked as well as for my own business. I've written scripts for radio commercials, product descriptions with fictional characterizations, stories about dolts I've worked with for amusement among employees. Yes, lots of things. 

The science still plays a part in my life though. My books usually have some sort of scientific tidbit or slant to them that the average person has no idea about. Of course since I write fiction, many may not believe it anyway.

That's enough about me for today.

Stanislaus County Library Community Novel

I signed up, I wrote and we'll see what happens. I did chapter 2. Check it out:

Ashes in a Teardrop