I was raised on an isolated, 80 acre horse farm in southern West Virginia that is surrounded almost entirely by a river, with the only place it's connected to 'dry land' being an old railroad tunnel. It also ran with cliffs, wooded trails, wild life, old fallen down home sites and abandoned cars rampant with copperheads - in short, practically every kind of danger a kid can grow up around except a city street. We didn't have cable, and my folks wouldn't pay for satellite, so I played in the woods, rode horses, climbed trees, waded and shot guns till dark, then I'd read. I read everything I could get my hands on, from classics to westerns to romances. When I discovered the old pulp authors, I left the other genres behind. Like many before me, I'd succumbed to the allure of science fiction, fantasy and horror. So it was the sheer lack of entertainment that drove me to a lifetime of reading, and it is a lifetime of reading that has led me to begin writing.

The earliest thing I really recall writing was when I was in 9th or 10th grade. I wrote a short story for a creative writing class and won first place in Mercer County (West Virginia). They published the story ('Forbidden Fruit' IIRC, a macabre little piece) in Mercer Musings for the year (around 1984-86). About that same time I began work on a comic book, a sort of Star Wars meets Sgt Rock saga about a pilot and his sexy copilot who are in space on a routine mission and get sucked into a worm hole, ending up light years from home on a planet where they discover the source of an alien race that has been attacking Earth for decades. The story was fun, they met lots of different creatures and got into a ton of scrapes, falling in love during the adventures. In the end I think I had over 70 pages that I'd sketched, inked, colored and wrote the panels and dialogue for. It was neat to see how my artwork improved during the course of that project. I never got to finish it, however - my house burned down while I was in college and I lost all the work.

After writing and submitting three novels based on the Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs, I felt that, rather than sit idle and wait for them to publish, that I should work on various other ideas I had. In Indie publishing I saw an opportunity to skip the red tape and get some stories in front of people sooner. I'm very glad I did so. I've met some wonderful people, fellow authors, etc, and discovered websites I otherwise would not know about.

What thrills me the most about writing is that it is a craft, and as such I derive the same sense of accomplishment as any craftsman might feel when completing a work. It's the word-craft that appeals to me. I love that there are many ways to say something, but that I have a quest to discover the way that works best for my story.

Having completed two Conan the Barbarian pastiches (one of which is a serious undertaking, while the other is a larky piece of flash fiction written more for humor than mayhem), I went back to expanding the universe of the Tomahawk series I began. I have published one story in this series called "The Blonde Goddess of Tikka-Tikka" which is a short, introduction to the series for which more titles are planned.

My favorite authors include Edgar Rice Burroughs, Clark Ashton Smith, H. P. Lovecraft, A. Merritt, Edmond Hamilton, Dennis L. McKiernan, R. A. Salvatore.

For recreation I love watching a good show on Netflix, playing guitar, collecting various things, reading, hanging with the wife and kids. Of late I've begun metal detecting and writing more poetry. I am really digging the detecting. I've also begun oil painting for fun. Anyone curious to see these may browse to my Deviant site and check them out: https://zlzf33.deviantart.com/gallery/64383721/My-oil-paintings. Those paintings of a fantasy theme I also post on my website at: https://www.chrisladamsbizarretales.com/fantasy-art.