About Samuel

I grew up in British Columbia, having lived in Victoria, Vancouver, the Okanogan, and the Cariboo region, but I have recently found myself struggling to get along in Southern Nova Scotia.  For the last seven plus years, I was a computer technician in 100 Mile House BC, but that ended when my boss closed the shop for family reasons. A wiser man would have taken over, but I’m a dreamer, so I saw the change as an opportunity to try something new, and left for horizons unknown. In the immortal words of Douglas Adams: “This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move." Nonetheless, here I am.

As an artist and writer:

As a writer, my creative influences are most strongly Michael Crichton, and Stephen King. My genre interests are diverse, but usually lean toward the adventurous. My favorite books are Treasure Island, Dracula, The Lord of the Rings, Dune, and the Lord of the Flies. I am also a giant comic book nerd, focused on DC and the more thoughtful Superman titles. Big event comics leave me cold, but I deeply love nuanced character studies in that format. I see the marriage of art and literature in comics, animation, and video games as the highest forms of human collaborative creativity. With those details, you should understand my approach to writing and storytelling. I have been told my style is highly cinematic, and I consider that a lovely compliment.

Writing isn’t my only outlet. I am a lifelong sketch artist, and I trained as an environment artist for the game design industry at the Vancouver Institute of Media Arts (VANarts). That life didn’t take off, but the experience has proven invaluable. The covers for all of my books are my design and artwork, containing no ai. Although I regrettably ​experimented with ai when the technology was new, I will never allow it to taint my work again. I currently work in the free to use digital art program Krita because adobe is disgustingly expensive. I hope that someday my life will have more room for fine art studies, and I aspire to properly learn how to paint. 

It is important to me to state clearly that I am physically disabled, and proudly neurodivergent. I have a fused neck, arthritis, ADHD, and a side order of OCD. You kinda have to be neurodivergent to write fiction, I think. I count it as a strength, not a weaknesses. It makes me a compulsive daydreamer, which has translated well into being an author. For example, my first trilogy of hard science fiction novels was a complete accident. The mood took me to write a short story, but my local store didn’t sell notebooks, so I decided to try the computer. That decision resulted in me obsessing over the story to the tune of three hundred thousand words.

A Cautionary Tale for other writers:

Regrettably, I was taken advantage of by a small “publishing” company when I was starting out as a writer. This is an all too common problem in our industry, and one many of you may be familiar with. While I was not left on the hook for financial expenses, many are. Be wary of who you trust, and always check a company out before submitting work. 

My first books were released without necessary editing or formatting, and without real efforts at marketing or any distribution. The company paid an editor who’s work was never used more than I ever saw in royalties, and listed that person as a contributor, although her work was fully discarded. They also listed me as a contributor to writing a book I had never even read, written by another person in my area who he was taking advantage of. I did give that person a piece of digital artwork to use before seeing their book, but I deeply regretted it once I became aware that the subject of the book was trophy hunting, which I am deeply morally opposed to.

I later discovered that this “publisher” was using amazon to create books and sending falsified sales data to his authors. How much I was used, I will never know. He was international, and lawyers advised me it was more expensive to chase that ball than catching it was likely to net me. I was fortunate that the contract I signed was limited.

I reclaimed the rights after that initial contract expired, and have re-released those books with dramatic improvements, but I will always feel like they are tainted. My focus now is on my historical detective series, a fantasy novel I am working on, and a new collection of short fiction. We must always move forward. The dream is still to sell my work to an established publisher and someday even translate my work into film and other media.  

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An Important Closing Note:

Dark omens and ill portents involving Samuel should be considered interdimensional propaganda, and ignored or reported to the office of the Oracle of Eternity.