Guest Post: How I became an Author by Sheldon Greene

Please welcome, Sheldon Greene, the author of After the Parch to the blog!

How I became an author

Probably the first factor was an early love of reading. It stimulated my imagination, helped it to flower. I developed the capacity to look into sites and visualize what was going on behind the window. I saw people and imagined their motivation, their back story.

 I was never one to escape into my own private fantasy world. Rather I suppose that the novelist in me needed to create an external world of my own, one that was public, for others to see and experience. Over a period of time it became a habit, an onanistic form of gratification. It was also an exercise in problem solving, a way of sorting out and making order out of the complexities of life.

Writing was never an obsession, just something that I do, much like eating when I'm hungry. I read about some event and it triggers a story in my mind. A few years later it's a manuscript and the characters are compressed on the pages looking for an audience, a chance to inhabit a reader's imagination. I do it because it's cathartic and in the end pleasurable. And it's a form of orderly, enduring communication, one that transcends my finite life.

-Sheldon Greene

About the Author

Sheldon Greene has been called "a born storyteller" by the Los Angeles Times for his book Lost and Found (Random House). This is his fifth novel. "I felt the need to describe our country as what it might become if we continue on the current trajectory." He is a lawyer and an executive in a wind energy development company, and has a background of high impact public interest litigation in health care, labor law, land policy, and immigration. He also sings in the Oakland Symphony Chorus and serves on several boards. 

Thanks for sharing your story with us, Sheldon!