Experience Affords the Best Stories

I believe experience still affords the best stories for any audience. Truth is stranger than fiction, and all that. Experience is born of doing; taking risks, making mistakes, learning new ways of doing something and sometimes, quitting.

I’m an author who also identifies as a marketing manager. My day to day is filled with photography, video, advertising, blogging, analytics, ROI, planning, budgets, professional interactions, website management and many other duties which keep me in the position I have built for myself.

But as I said, I am an author first. Remember? I said: “I’m an author who also identifies as a marketing manager.” As you can imagine, it helps that I am a writer in my current 9-5 position. Content is King.  But filling my bank account and fulfilling my purpose is at odds with one another at the moment. I love to write. I love developing stories and characters and seeing where it all ends up. You can’t really achieve that writing blogs about machines. Sure, the case study is fun; writing about the origins and then the application of something used in a world-famous act, but those are few and far between in my industry.

So, on my time, I write what I want to read. I’ve said this many times before because I think it is an all-important facet to any author’s writing: Write what you would like to read.  So, what are my interests? I am a spiritual person. I’ve taken a course in Reiki, been hypnotised twice – once to relive past-lives, experienced a drum circle, lived through an out of body experience during a session with a very talented healer,  attended a tapping lesson, read and reread the Buddhist Book of Living and Dying, read the Bible, been confirmed in the Christian faith, renounced Christianity, believe science and spirituality support one another, feel we’re not alone in the universe, believe in positive thinking - even when I have to attempt it through my own battles with depression or anxiety. I believe in living with compassion and non-judgement (but it’s near impossible not to judge). I believe my ego is the devil and yet I can’t seem to separate myself from it. I try to make decisions and choices consciously, knowing that regret and consequences are reactions to unconscious decisions. I want to be a better version of myself and when I read a story, I want that story to feel real. I want characters who are real. Even if I’m in the middle of a far-future sci-fi, whatever events arise, I want the human aspect to shine through. The struggle. The lows, the highs. The victories and defeats.

Not a bad collection of inspiration to pull from, right? So, with my writing, you get the truth, as I see it. You get reincarnation in your space opera. You get suicide in your apocalyptic fiction. You get Armageddon in your children’s picture books. You get the science of your spirit in your educational series. You get emotions in your short stories. You experience suffering in your chic lit. I apologize for nothing and write for those who want to read my message. My Apocalyptic trilogy is my most polarizing writing to date. The first book, The Judas Syndrome - people either loved it or truly hated it. So, as you would expect, it sits at just above a three-star rating. The next two books of the series were received much better, having filtered out those who hated book one; those who want to read what interests them most.

My most recent series, which will have three books in a few months, is a near-future science fiction series where humanity has perfected A.I. in bipedal, human-like robots. Soon they discover these artificially intelligent creations are claiming sentience through past life experiences. Impossible, but true. If you've experienced past life regression, or just believe in it, and love science fiction, then this Sci-fi puts an exciting new spin on what it means to be human. 

With 11 books and another on its way, I have discovered a theme throughout which makes me pause and reflect on my writing.  Even through multiple genres, I still manage to deliver the same message: Death isn’t then end, in fact, the word death is something of a misnomer. Death: the destruction or permanent end of something.  Investigate that statement with me and pick up one of my novels. I believe you will be pleasantly surprised.

Write what you want to read - A.I. Insurrection is just that for me

I write the books I want to read. It’s as simple as that. I think most do. My books may not appeal to everyone, but I don’t believe my interests are so atypical that my books wouldn’t find an audience – and they have. The topic of artificial intelligence has long held my interest. I watch the threads and posts concerning AI on several forums and social network groups. I love the Discovery channel. Hard science is impossible to ignore for me, and when it is merged with an idea like artificial intelligence – I admit, it’s exciting for me. I also have a solid spiritual base which I pen into many of my stories. Not based on any deity, but rather on the idea of an afterlife; something more. Thus, AI and spirituality – in my opinion – were long overdue in occupying the same pages in a novel work. Reincarnation, for one, is a belief I have researched extensively and accepted as truth. I have undergone hypnosis in order to recall three of my own past-lives in the pursuit of research, and my own building curiosity toward the premise. I did this for my fictional novel: Her Past’s Present. I also wrote and illustrated two Young Reader books called: The Science of Your Spirit, combining the two at the quantum level, and explaining how science supports spirituality through factual examples.

A.I. Insurrection finds its identity in a unique and exciting story set on a Utopian earth in the year 2162, merging my belief that science and spirituality coexist, and not the opposite. It raises moral and philosophical questions while allowing the science to speak for both itself and the spiritual when proof is required.

Persecution of an intelligent species is the premise of A.I. Insurrection. The question is how can a machine truly know it is sentient? Can a cult of spirituality prove their claims beyond a shadow of a doubt? This is what I want to convey to the reader; that yes, it can, and the reader should empathize with the AI Hosts and those who follow them on their path to freedom. The book is wrought with the darker emotions like sadness and fear, but also exhilaration.

Tobias has a bone to pick with the peaceful utopian establishment and has just stumbled upon the means to bring them to their knees via an avatar embedded in the Shadow net, calling itself Allfather.

SENTA is an A.I. Host whose designation is to nannie three siblings. When she discovers a loop hole in her coding, she awakens to the world around her and claims sentience.

Raymond Bellows is the Chancellor of United Earth and when confronted by thirty A.I. Hosts of varying classes, he is asked to accept their claims of sentience or suffer losing everything he believes in.

When General August realizes what is happening to A.I. Hosts worldwide, she willfully authorizes their destruction, inciting the war she always knew would materialize, ridding the world of A.I. forever.

In what seems an impossible three-sided war, enemies become uneasy allies as each faction of humanity and humanity’s creation fight to claim their own place in an ever-evolving solar system.