From my desk to your hands...

Actually, this is not my desk. It's an AI image the website builder created for me. I wish my desk looked this good!

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

Firstly, it’s the name on my birth certificate.

I had two uncles, one on each side, whose first name was John. When my mother told my father she wanted to name me ‘John’, he replied, ‘That’s fine, but I’m going to call him Jack.’ For the most part, I’ve been ‘Jack’ ever since. ‘Gray’ is my great grandmother’s maiden name. There are apocryphal stories about where my last name comes from, but I won’t bore you with those stories here.

With all that family history behind ‘John Gray Swan’ I could hardly pick any other name for a family saga.

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

Finally, it is wonderfully ironic.

When I announced at the age of thirteen that I wanted to be a writer, my mother was horrified. The words ‘artist’ and ‘starving’ went together too well for her taste.

I always knew I was in real trouble when she shouted up the stairs, ‘John Gray Swan, you get down here right this minute!’ 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 1960s I went to public school in Akron, Ohio and Scotia, New York. In the 1970s I went to a small private college in eastern Ohio called Muskingum College. There wasn’t anybody in any of the 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. We made two babies that 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 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 and that I had actually written a series of novels.

The first one is available for purchase now!

About the Author...