John Rhoades

Ah, Sherman, prepare the Wayback Machine! It all started in kindergarten, believe it or not. That is not to say I was some kind of savant. I think the actual term you may be looking for is “idiot.” The truth was, I was a rather slow kid. I like to think maybe I was methodical, but I suspect dumb is probably more accurate. At any rate, I didn’t pick things up that quickly. But I did have a couple of great teachers. My kindergarten teacher and my first grade teacher were good friends, and for some unknown reason, they took a special interest in me, cultivating my study of the alphabet and starting me solidly on a path to literacy that may not have come otherwise. But as with all school children, my writing consisted mainly of essays on summer vacations. Then flash forward to the fifth grade. My teacher at that venerable grade allocated a portion of our class each week to weekly writing assignments. But she did it with a strange twist. She wanted us to write fiction! I had never conceived of such a thing, but I found I liked it. The notion of becoming a writer did not occur to me until high school, though (or maybe it was middle school; I never could keep track of those things). Inspired by "Empire Strikes Back," a buddy and me decided we would write books one night (about bounty hunters of all things), then read each other’s books the next day. For any who has ever written a book, you know how ridiculous a proposition this was to write an entire novel in a single evening. But we were kids and didn’t know better. And as you might expect, we didn’t write books that night. However, the idea stuck with me, and just a short century or so later, that idea finally struck pay dirt (figuratively speaking of course) with the publication of my first novel, "How the West Was Saved."

I think my writing process can best be described as organized chaos, minus the “organized” part. Basically, I like to draw up an outline that I treat more as a suggested route to follow than a hard and fast map that will take me from point A to point B. This gives the story an opportunity to live and breathe on its own, which makes the writing process for me as fun and exciting as I hope the reading experience is for my readers. But this guidance-less process is not without its consequences. Because of the way the second book in my Mercantile Chronicles series (“Annie Get Your Soul”) ended, I threw out my idea for the third book and wrote “Dashing Dave Rides Again” instead. I then went on to change the character of Dashing Dave so profoundly that I had to scrap half of the first draft of my manuscript. And still that is not enough for me! Even as I write this, two weeks out from publication, I am considering a change to the last chapter of “Dashing Dave” that will be a minor change for “Dashing Dave,” but a game changer for the series. Is this madness? Probably! But it also makes the writing process much more interesting, and in the end I figure that if it isn’t fun for me, it won’t be for the reader.