Steven A. Twitty

I was eleven years old when I wrote my first novel, a sixty-four page epic about two youths who are somehow transported back in time to when dinosaurs ruled. Where the actual manuscript ended up is a mystery but I do recall encouragement from my mother to keep writing. But alas, life intervened and it was not until my mid-thirties, when I lived and worked in Venezuela, that I took up the pen with a fervent desire to write novels.

The defining incident that stirred me to put pen to paper came while reading a paperback I had picked up in some Venezuelan market. The story’s hero was a mercenary who parachuted into a jungle clearing on a moonless night. There was nothing particularly notable about that scene except as the story’s main character drifted to earth under the Nylon canopy, the author had him look up into the starry sky.

What?

Now, I will admit, parachuting from an airplane that is not plummeting to earth in flames has never been on my bucket list and with the utmost of assurance I can say it never will be, so I cannot honestly say how much sky one can see after pulling a parachute’s rip-cord but to this layman, that description of the hero’s view was as unmistakable as it was unbelievable. His parachute had to have been no bigger than a handkerchief. And with that, I found the inspiration to prove to myself I could write a more convincing tale.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself. I am Tennesseean by birth and by age seven my parents, my older brother and I had lived in Germany for three years with two more years in Fort Benning, Georgia before my father left military service. From Georgia, we moved to South Miami, Florida where for me, the real magic started; read my book, Saving Moses. It was here, in Perrine, Florida, that I wrote that sixty-four page epic between school, domestic chores and outdoor adventures with my three best friends.

Fast forward a few years. I was fifteen when my family moved from Florida back to Tennessee, to Chattanooga, where I attended high school and college. I do recall writing stories during this time but most of what I authored was confined to essays and term papers. Even after graduation in 1973 and my employment with an international snack food company, I wrote periodically but nothing of significance. That was about to change.

In 1981, my employer offered me a life-changing opportunity that I grabbed and never looked back, to join the company’s international division with my first assignment being Singapore. I moved to the “Lion City” with an open mind, taking in the cultural smorgasbord and writing pages of descriptions of sights, sounds and smells for some story I had yet to conjure.

After two years in Singapore, I relocated to Venezuela where I had that fateful encounter with a fiction character who seemed to have X-ray vision, after which I wrote an adventure novel set in the Venezuelan jungle, still unfinished. From South America, I was transferred to Australia where I wrote the first draft of Terror Beneath The Bayou and after three years ‘down under’ I returned to South America, to Ecuador, for two years which led to my last assignment, a two year stint in Beijing, China. After leaving China in 1990, I moved to Bangkok, Thailand where my wife at the time and three year old daughter lived and where I have lived since, working as a consultant in the snack food industry and writing novels.

Living overseas has not only been an adventure, it has been and still is an inspiration that spawned a number of books, including, Never Say Never, a fiction story based on actual events I witnessed in 1989 during the Tiananmen Square uprising in Beijing, China. Regretfully, I do not know what happened to that manuscript. At the time, computers had excessively small memory compared to today and data was written on 3.5 inch floppy discs that tended to fail without warning if mishandled or stored too long.

Since leaving Beijing and moving to Bangkok, I completed and published Terror Beneath The Bayou and immediately got stuck into Saving Moses, followed by Betwixt And Between and my latest work, Lady Alone.

I don’t have a favorite author. I’ve read a range of authors from Micheal Crichton to Isaac Asimov, James Patterson, Carlos Castaneda and Kurt Vonnegut, with an extensive list of books by other authors.

As for my own works, I write stories to which I “feel” drawn, not focusing on a single genre. I can’t see myself writing a war novel or fantasy but another sci-fi book similar to Terror Beneath The Bayou or a sequel to Betwixt And Between are certainly possible. Currently, I am working on a space adventure set on a planet far, far away and involving an earth-based salvage crew and some unsavory characters.

Thank you for your interest in my books and I hope you enjoy my stories as much as I enjoyed writing them.