Joseph Kainz

I've wanted to write as long as I can remember. Even before I could actually write very well I would draw a series of pictures and staple them together to form books. Ever since I've started to write books and found myself unable to finish them. I've taken a number of steps over the years to try to remedy that. Learning how to write non-fiction papers for History and Political Science in college and grad school was very helpful. I joined a Play-By-Email RPG group and that greatly aided some of the problems I was having with writing dialogue. Voracious reading of fiction (especially that of some fantastic authors) helped me understand what fiction should look like and voracious consumption of the news helped provide grounding and material.

Ultimately though the thing that helped push me over the edge and allow me to finish books was something that I really hadn't expected to be relevant. When I joined the Army I had pretty much set aside the idea of being a writer. I was planning on either staying in or working similar jobs as a Defense Contractor for the rest of my life. If I thought of writing at all it was as something I might do after I retired, or on the side. For various reasons that didn't come to fruition, but my time with the Army did yield something unexpected. I had a lot of new experiences and a surprising number of them had at least tangential relevance to the type of things I wanted to write about.

I will never pretend that I was a grunt or that I "saw some shit" as the saying goes. I worked at a desk. Still the experiences I did have, or observed, or heard about were useful to me as an author. I trained as a soldier, deployed to Afghanistan, got out of the Army and deployed to Afghanistan again as a civilian contractor. I experienced things I never had before and learned things about the world and how it works.

When I came back from Afghanistan the second time I discovered there were some paperwork problems that precluded immediate employment in my field. I was single and I had savings so I wasn't too concerned and I decided to just wait while the issue was resolved. One day I sat down and began to write, just as I had done so many time before in my life. This time something was different though. I didn't get stuck. I didn't stop. Every time the characters encountered something new I found that I had some sort of tangential experience to draw on that made the scene easier to write.

I finished writing that book. It was the first time I had ever finished writing a (non-short) story that I had started. I had the rough draft that would become In the Shadow of the Nasilene. I decided to see if it was a fluke and I sat down quite deliberately to write a story in a different genre and a very different style. It took much longer but eventually Sector 12 and the Art of Dying existed in rough draft form. I realized that I might actually be able to fulfill my life-long dream of becoming an author and I set out to publish both.