The advice many people, who are starting out in a writing career, get from more experienced writers is often, write what you know.

This is good advice but for a long time I thought it only referred to those writing non fiction or perhaps writers of contemporary fiction after all, how could it possibly pertain to writers of fantasy or sci fi. I once commented on a post about this topic saying that it couldn’t possibly refer to me as my stories are set in the future and also in deep space for most of the time. What could I know of these things seeing as how no one has been to these places or seen any of the things I wrote about, that’s why it’s called fiction, I suppose.

It just illustrated how much I didn’t know about writing at that time. Writing what you know is crucial, especially when writing about characters. You make them more believable, more real by adding experiences from your own life. Even fantasy writers need to do this to make their characters more relatable to the reader even if they are an elf or dwarf, they still have feelings and emotions. This is what we write about that we know of.

The latest book in the ATLAS Force series is my proudest book to date, I say this not only because my editor said that it was my best work to date but because I used this advice and added some of the experiences that my protagonist, Colonel Jack Flynn went through from my own. This book is probably the most personal to me of all the seventeen already published because of this. The situation that Jack has to face is something I went through not too long ago so when I was writing it I called upon my own memories of those days to make it as real for the reader as I could without going over the top with sentimentality. It was possibly the hardest bit of writing I have ever undertaken for this reason alone. The emotions I felt were raw and when I was done I felt exhausted but feel the book is better for adding this extra back story. I feel it gives the added depth needed for the story.

You can grab a copy of the book along with all the books in the series on Amazon, Pray for Death is available for the Kindle or paperback here https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07D9VWLZW