1) Tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get into writing?
Born into the Boomer generation, I grew up in a neighborhood of duplexes abutting the undeveloped woods with packs of kids from working-class families living unsupervised adventures. My high school days were a version of the movie American Graffiti. We lived our stories, and to this day, my buddies and I amuse ourselves for hours retelling, reliving, and laughing about them. It’s a wonder we even lived to tell about some of them.
I always liked to sing. In grammar school I was a choir boy, singing in church every Sunday, and in my teenage years I would sing Doo-wop with the boys on the street corners and was a lead singer in several garage bands. By the time I was 23, I moved on to NYC, and soon became lead singer and songwriter of a band playing the circuit of clubs in Greenwich Village.
By 1965, I got married and hitchhiked to California with my wife. Over the next few years, we moved back to Connecticut and had three children. Weekend adventures were a regular ritual in our family life raising the kids. We would listen to stories, old radio shows, and music on our road trips together, and create our own stories in impromptu choose-your-own-adventure car games.
I always loved telling stories and writing poetry.
2) What inspired you to write your book?
When my first son Eli was 4 years old, I put him into art school as a result of a drawing he did of Batman, Robin, and Superman running abreast. You could feel the motion in the drawing. Since then, he’s done many drawings, one of which was a flying saucer resting on the ocean floor. This picture became the cover of the first book of my Pirates of Marauda trilogy, Circles in Time, and was the spark for my inspiration to write these books.
My kids had grown and moved out by then, and I was devoting more time to writing poetry and doing photography. I was pairing these pursuits in a project I called Thoughts and Images.
When I saw Eli’s picture of the submerged flying saucer, I started imagining it as an adventure starring my boys and me. I suppose I was missing our weekly adventures of old. The story took hold of me and led me in its unfolding, one chapter after another. I really had no idea where it was taking me. After getting it all down on paper, I edited it, rewrote it, and refined it countless times to get to the finished books that I self-published.
3) What theme or message do you hope readers will take away from your book?
My philosophy that rules the worlds played out in my books is that we are all the One called Me. In other words, we are all aspects of one divine spirit, able to create better than we can imagine.
4) What drew you into this particular genre?
Adventure was always the way I viewed my life, and sci-fi was an influential part of our family’s cultural enjoyment with Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and Star Wars.
5) If you could sit down with any character in your book, what would you ask them and why?
I feel like Captain Rosario’s character is my alter ego.
Although he’s a pirate, Rosario upholds his own strict moral code of honor. He doesn’t commit gratuitous violence, he takes care of his crew and shares his wealth equally, and he prefers to use his wiles over force to achieve his goals. When a conflux of events plucks him out of the proper historical time and place of his life, he is forced to live out his days in exile, stripped of his purpose on a strange world in an unknown time, with the only remnant of his identity being the recognition of his loyal crew who still see him as their captain.
I feel like his storyline has some parallels to any person’s time travel through his own life. If I could sit down with Rosario, I would ask him to tell me about the adventures of his youth, as a buccaneer in his prime sailing the seas in search of treasure.
6) What social media site has been the most helpful in developing your readership?
I’m new to the adventure of marketing my books and look forward to developing my readership in all possible ways, better than I can imagine.
7) What advice would you give to aspiring or just starting authors out there?
Write what comes naturally and rely on spontaneity, instinct, and intuition alongside intellect and good research. When you edit, read it aloud. When you’re finished editing, edit it again, and again, and again.
8) What does the future hold in store for you? Any new books/projects on the horizon?
I get my adventure fix weekly as resident pro at Paintball Jungle. I also still enjoy singing and regularly perform for senior communities as well as on the streets as a troubadour.
As for writing, I’ve been doing short vignettes of funny or poignant scenes from my memories growing up. Whether they will turn into a new book or project remains to be seen.
About the Author
Author FOREST FOX brings his love of adventure to the page in this whirlwind fantasy saga, The Pirates of Marauda trilogy, about what happens when he and his two sons, while on a treasure hunting, diving expedition in the Bermuda Triangle, find a sunken flying saucer that turns out to be the craft that brought Adam and Eve to this planet.
The germinating idea for the story was inspired by a drawing by his son, award-winning artist Eli D’Elia. The author delights in weaving fact with fiction and folklore in this highly original tale, which also serves as a whimsical medium to depict his unconventional philosophy of life.
The author is also a SF Bay Area singer/songwriter and recording and performing artist.
Known in the world of paintball as Magic Carpet Bob, he was 1991 World Paintball Champion with his Team Ironmen, and is resident pro at Paintball Jungle in the Napa Valley.
