Introduction

    My name is J. Evan Stuart and I've had a life-long love of books. Nothing was better than getting lost in a story that would take me to faraway places and send me on adventures with characters who became my friends.

    When I was young, I wanted to write the types of stories I loved to read, but school succeeded in squashing my little dream. While I always received high marks on my writing, having to constantly write on topics I wasn't really interested in made writing in my free time not something I readily pursued. By the time I finished college, one of my great joys was not having to write anything.

    The years passed and my career choices always had me being around kids. I was tutoring a child one evening and was helping him with an assignment. He was to come up with a few paragraphs to start a story and it had to contain conflict. We came up with a scenario of a couple of high school boys having a confrontation in a bathroom and an iPod ends up being dropped in a toilet. For some reason the scene stuck with me long after the assignment was completed.

    A year later I was still thinking about and wondering who these two boys were and what would happen next. I took up pen and paper to answer my questions, never really thinking I was actually trying to write a story. But a story came and for the last five years my pen has taken me on wonderful adventures and created characters who have become my friends.

    Over the next few weeks I will be highlighting authors and their works that I have enjoyed or that have inspired me. Feel free to visit the pages that highlight my works in progress and follow me on Twitter for the latest updates on my blog.