From my desk to your hands...

Actually, this is not my desk. It's an AI image the website software generated. The scene outside my window is not this leafy, and my desk is never this tidy. And, for goodness sake, where's the laptop?

Hi, I'm Jack Swan, the human behind "John Gray Swan". I chose to publish my books under this name for three reasons.

First, it’s the name on my birth certificate. "John" and "Gray" are names from my mother’s family tree. Of course, the last name came from my father. With that kind of family history behind it, my legal name seemed fitting for a family saga.

Second, I think it has a nice writerly ring to it, and it looks swell on the book cover.

Third, it's wonderfully ironic.

When I announced at the age of thirteen that I wanted to be a writer, my mother was horrified.

“John Gray Swan!” she hollered, as she often did when she was upset with me. “You'll do no such thing.” The words "artist" and "starving" went together too well for her liking.

It delights me to imagine her shouting "John Gray Swan" from the covers of my books.

It’s been a long road from the age of thirteen to get to the point where I have a novel out in the world. In the 1960s I went to public schools in Ohio and New York State. In the 1970s I went to a small private college in eastern Ohio. There wasn’t a single person in any of those schools that thought I had a chance in hell of becoming a writer. Well, there was one, so I married her.

She supported me for almost ten years while I worked intermittently at minimum wage jobs and wrote terrible short stories on yellow legal pads. In 1982 she decided it was time for us to have babies, so, I went back to school to learn computer programming.

I retired from a career of writing retail software in 2016. If you have bought merchandise at Home Depot, The Limited, or Old Navy (among others) you’ve interacted with software I helped create.

In 2017 I started to write a novel. Recently, I realized that I had already written hundreds of thousands of words. It turns out I had actually written the basis for a series of novels.

The first one is available for purchase now!

About the Author...