An Interview With Boyd Morrison, Author of The Ark

I was sent this book unsolicited, which is always cool - even if some books (not this one, though) turn out to fail the Butki 100 page test (if I hit page 100 and I have no interest in what happens next with the plot and/or the characters then I set that book aside.).

At first it reminded me of a rip-off of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code books since the title comes from the discovery of the real life Noah's Ark. I am not a fan of Dan Brown and wrote about our weird relationship in a prior Blogcritics piece.

But then I read the story about how this book come to be and I decided, if nothing else, I wanted to help publicize THAT story - how a book could be self-published, then a hit on Kindle and now is published by a big publishing company (thus the unsolicited mailings to writers like me.)

So this first part of this two-part interview focuses on that story. Fortunately, the book itself is also quite good, nothing like the shallow characters and predictable plot twists of Dan Brown's books.

I could say more but I'd rather just get to the interview.

First, can you tell the story - because it's a big part of why I wanted to do this interview - about how this book came about? Start please with the arrangement with your wife. She gave you time to work on the book and it was out of that that this book came about?

My wife and I had been married for a couple of years when she was looking for a career change and decided that she wanted to go to med school. I thought it was a great idea, but because she had been an English major in college, she had never taken a college-level science class. So including the pre-med courses she would need to take, it would be nine years before she would be a practicing physician.

Around that time I wrote my first thriller novel, The Adamas Blueprint. I didn't have success finding an agent for it, but I knew I wanted to take a crack at writing more novels. So my wife and I made a deal. I would put writing aside and work full-time to support her dream of becoming a doctor, and then when she was finished with her training, I would get to quit my job and try writing full-time with the goal of getting published in nine years. I'm happy to say I did it in five. 
 
Then what happened next? The story about how it was self-published but is now being officially published is an inspiring story, I think, to all of aspiring novelists.

Article Author: Scott Butki

Scott Butki was a newspaper reporter for more than 10 years before making a career change into education... then into special education.

He reads at least 50 books a year and has about the same number of author interviews each year and, …

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