Collateral Effects

I am that rarest of species, a native Floridian. I was born in Tampa in 1966, the son of a Baptist preacher. Dad was in his early 40s when I was born and had been the nose gunner on a B24 bomber in WWII---he had been shot down over the Ploesti Oil Fields, bailed out of his bomber and spent nearly a year in a POW camp. Needless to say, his stories had quite the effect on me as a child, as did the tales of Robert Heinlein, whose "juvenile" novels shaped my adolescence. I fell in love with science fiction early. I attended Florida Southern College on an ROTC scholarship and graduated with a BA in History and a commission in the Army. I served as an Infantry platoon leader with the 25th ID in Hawaii before getting out and bouncing around from one job to another for a while before settling on teaching. And through that whole time, I was writing. I wrote my first novel (a wretched espionage thriller/action story) in 10th grade, my second (a wish fulfillment adventure story) as a senior in high school. They were both horrible and both written longhand on notebook paper and I threw them both away at some point while I was in college. It was in college that I began writing my first science fiction novel. I began writing a story I called Rituals, which later, after many, many years and many revisions became Duty, Honor, Planet. At the same time I came up with a plot for a book that would later be the basis for the characters of Birthright. After getting out of the Army, I finished the books and got a literary agent, but couldn't break into the genre so I shelved them and gave up on getting published. Then came the advent of e-books and the opportunity to self-publish on Amazon. And I figured, what the heck? What was there to lose? And the strangest thing happened...people BOUGHT the two books, lots of people, and they liked them! That lit the fire under my butt to write even more, and 14 months later I finished the sequel to Duty, Honor, Planet, titled Honor Bound. It took another 15 months to finish the third and (for the moment) last book in the series, The Line of Duty, which just came out in June of 2014. I am currently working on Northwest Passage, a sequel to Birthright. Follow my progress on my Facebook page at:https://www.facebook.com/DutyHonorPlanet or follow me on Twitter @RickPartlow66 I live in central Florida with my wife of 20+ years, our two children and a willfull mutt of a dog.