Jim has eight published
SF&F books, with two more due out in 2015. He's been unusually
successful as a self-published writer; Child of the Sword went
word-of-mouth viral about two years ago, and among all his books he has
since sold close to 50,000 copies. With that success, he was able to
quit his day-job as a running-dog-lackey for the Bourgeois capitalist
establishment, and work for himself as a full-time writer. He says his
new boss is a real jerk - so demanding.
Jim writes in three
sub-genres: epic-fantasy, hard science fiction, and contemporary urban
fantasy - no vampires - frequently with strong young-adult themes. The
infamous "they" say that one should not write in multiple genres, but
"they" also say, "write what you read," and Jim reads copious quantities of all three.
Jim is also a scientist with a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering; his specialty is laser physics. He has a big pet peeve
regarding lasers as weapons in science fiction. He spent decades working in the laser and electro-optics industry, even did some research on
laser weapons in the 80's. And when writers use a laser as a weapon in a story, they invariably get it wrong, usually by violating some basic
law of physics. Jim gives a workshop on laser weapons, and what writers
do wrong - no names please.
Jim was born in Seattle, but he's
lived most of his life in California, though he did live on the east
coast and in Europe for a while. He now resides in Arizona with his wife Karen and their three cats: Tilda, Julia and Natasha. From a very early age he made up stories in his head, but he never considered writing. In his family you went to college, got a degree in something useful and
got a real job, so he did the Ph.D. thing. But he was still making up
those stories in his head, so he sat down and wrote a science fiction
novel, and as he says, "It was 250,000 words of pure crap." It was the
hardest decision he ever made, but he literally threw it away and turned to other writing projects.
Science has always been a passion of
Jim's, but writing is an addiction. He just recently published The Name
of the Sword, the 4th and final book in the series that started with
Child of the Sword. Right now he's working on Treason's Child, the
prequel to A Choice of Treasons, which should be out in mid-2015. Never
Dead Enough, the 3rd took in The Dead Among us, will follow near the end of 2015.
Jim intends to keep on writing and publishing more stories, but no laser weapons.
