PEAK CROSSER is here!
/PEAK CROSSER (EMPIRE OF THE PEAKS BOOK 1) is available to purchase as a paperback on Amazon. It will be available soon as an ebook on most popular ebook platforms. PEAK CROSSER is Adam's debut novel, an epic fantasy set in an ancient empire covered by a nearly impassable mountain range.
I can’t say when I first wanted to write a novel. I have notebooks filled with stories, most of them incomplete, dating back to when I was eleven. I’ve always told stories to myself, often mash-ups of others stories. (In one universe I combined STAR WARS, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA and THE MAN FROM SNOWY RIVER.)
In junior high and high school I made attempts at books. At age thirteen, I started to pen a memoir (maybe a little too early on that one). In high school I started several novels, writing nearly one-hundred pages (by hand) of one about the mob running an independent baseball league in New England. As as adult, there were al least a dozen attempts at fantasy and science fiction novels. The stories varied in quality and genre, but they shared one common thread: I never finished any of them.
The only thing I every really finished that wasn’t part of a school assignment happened in 2002: I wrote a terrible screenplay. I shared it with three people — my wife, my brother and a close friend. I was answered with stoney silence from all of them. I’m not being falsely modest — it was atrocious and damaged my confidence as a writer, sending me into years of forced non-writing.
Then in a car conversation with my wife in 2011, I told her that I needed to create, to tell stories not just for myself, but for other. And I’d stick to what I was passionate about — science fiction and fantasy, hopefully creating a story akin to the ones which drove my imagination, stories told by writers like Card, LeGuinn, Lewis and Sanderson. As only the people who love you the most can do, Kathleen told me to stop talking about doing it and do it.
I stopped reading books about writing. I stopped doing writing exercises. The time had come to write something and finish it. I outlined a new fantasy novel, something brand new which didn’t have the baggage of past (and failed) attempts, and then I wrote it. A dozen drafts later over four years, that novel is now available for people to buy. The official publication date for the paperback version of PEAK CROSSER (EMPIRE OF THE PEAKS BOOK 1) will forever be May 31, 2016.
One of my favorite stories of that day will always be of my niece and nephew Julia and Elijah hearing the news from their mother. They danced and sang, “He’s going to be famous.”
I have no idea if this secondary career as a novelist will work, and chances are I’ll never be famous. But I know where I’ve come from, and I know where I’m going. Writing, creating — it’s part of who I am, who I’ve always been. Stories burst spontaneously in my mind, most of them nothing more than self-entertainment. But now some will become more than that, become tales I share with the world. And that lifts me up higher than I even imagined it would.
Who’s ready for Book 2?