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?

I have been called by the name “Jack” my entire life, but I chose to publish this book under the name “John Gray Swan”. One reason is that it’s the name on my birth certificate.

But the primary reason is this:

At thirteen I announced to my mother that I wanted to be a writer. She was horrified. The words ‘artist’ and ‘starving’ went together all too well for her taste. “John Gray Swan,” she said, “you will do no such thing!” As a child I knew I was in real trouble when she called me by my full name.

It delights me to imagine her shouting angrily “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 book out in the world. In the 1950s and 60s, I went to public schools in northern Ohio and upstate New York. In the 1970s, I went to a small private college in eastern Ohio. There wasn’t anybody in any of those schools that thought I had a chance in hell of becoming a writer. Well, I found one, so I married her.

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

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 many other retail outlets) you’ve interacted with software I helped develop.

In 2017, I started writing a novel. Recently, I realized that I had written several hundred thousand words, which meant I had written, not just a novel, but a series of novels.

Keep your eye out for the next one.

About the Author...