About Rodney
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Rodney Hartman is a retired U.S. Army veteran with over twenty years of experience in military operations ranging from an infantry private in the paratroops to a Chief Warrant Officer flying helicopters during the Persian Gulf War. Mr. Hartman currently works as a computer programmer specializing in secure web applications. He enjoys writing in his spare time, and he has written numerous articles as a ghost writer for various websites.
Rodney lives in North Carolina with his wife and family along with their cat, McKenzie. |
How I Became an Author
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Every author who creates an author webpage faces the dilemma of balancing how to tell the reader a little bit about themselves without boring them stiff. It’s a difficult task, but no matter how I try to word my bio, I always come back to the military. My wife says my military tendencies infiltrate their way into just about everything I do. I have to agree. And, I don’t mean the more violent parts of being in the military. I mean the more subtle things about military life that I don’t even think about. After spending twenty years in the Army, the military culture is just embedded in me.
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For instance, I like being on time. In fact, I like being early. I used to carry the earliness to extremes, but my children broke me of that habit after I woke them up at 0400 hours one morning to rush them to the airport. When we got there, we were so early, the ticket agents hadn’t even showed up (it was a small airport, so no 24/7 work schedule for them). After that fiasco, I tend to let my wife pick more reasonable times to show up for events.
I do have a lot of good tendencies from my time in the military; loyalty and dependability to name a couple. My wife says my good qualities allow her to overlook some of my more irritating military habits such as showing up early for things.
What did I do during my twenty years in the military? Well, I spent my first ten years in the Airborne Infantry (i.e. paratroops) jumping out of perfectly good airplanes and hanging out with other soldiers who liked to do the same. Most of those ten years were a time of relative peace for my country, and I spent all of it at Fort Bragg, North Carolina working my way up through the ranks from buck private to sergeant first class as a platoon sergeant. At that time, paratroopers tended to stay at Fort Bragg for years without having to move, and I had squad and team leaders who I’d gotten as buck privates. Consequently, the leaders in my platoon were very good at working together.
But all things change, and after ten years, I got an itch to try something new. (It could be that I’d gotten married, and being in the Airborne Infantry and spending a lot of time in the field wasn’t as much fun as it had been.) Anyway, I decided to become a helicopter pilot. After ten and a half months of flight school, the Army had a brand-spanking new warrant officer pilot. It was a great rank, and I did so enjoy flying helicopters. (Well, okay. I enjoyed it most of the time. Sometimes we tended to get into dangerous situations, and then it was a case of wishing I was anywhere on the ground instead of up in the air flying.) In 1990, I deployed with my aviation unit to the Persian Gulf. I returned back to the states in 1991 after the war, and I retired shortly thereafter.
But who can retire on half pay when they have a wife and two young children to support? Not me. So with the encouragement and support of my wife, I went to college to get a degree in computer programming. Even with my wife working and the additional money from my GI Bill, our financial situation was tight. By the time I got my computer programming degree two years later our savings account was a big fat zero. However, it all worked out for the best due to a little thing called the Y2K scare. I was blessed in that when I graduated from college in 1993 with the ink still wet on my degree, businesses were hiring computer programmers right and left to modify their computer code to handle the dreaded Y2K programming bug. For those who weren’t alive at the time, the Y2K problem turned out to be not so much of a problem, or…., maybe we computer programmers fixed all the bugs before the year 2000 occurred. For me it didn’t really matter, because by the time the Y2K problem came and went, I was a highly experienced and sought after computer programmer.
In the mid 1990’s I was once again blessed by being in the right place at the right time. One of my managers gave me the opportunity to work in a new programming environment called the Internet creating screens for some newfangled thing called a web browser. Lacking the required skills, I started taking weekend and evening classes at a local community college in HTML, C++, and Java programming languages. That was a rough time for my family and I in that for the next 18 months I pretty much got up in the morning, went to work at my fulltime programming job all day, stopped off for my evening classes on the way home, and finally got home around 10:00 p.m. that night just to start it all over again the next morning. However, it paid off in that the Internet and web programming became the hot commodity of the day, and I was picked up by a computer consulting company. Things were going well.
In 2005, tragedy stuck. My wife of 26 years was diagnosed with cancer. We fought it hard for 10 months, but my wife, Susan, lost the battle in 2006. My children and I were devastated. But God works wonders in people’s lives, and in 2009 I met and married a good woman with two children of her own. Over the intervening years, our two families have blended together, and I love all four of my children and my wife very much. I am very blessed.
So, where does the writing come in? Well…, way back in the Fall/Winter of 1990/1991, I was sitting in a tent out in the middle of the desert waiting to see if my nineteen years of military training was going to be called upon in actual combat. When not flying my helicopter on support missions, I had a lot of free time. So, I started thinking about how I would write a story about a character if he was a mix of technology and magic. I jotted down a few notes, but most of the ideas I just kept in my head. After all, at that time the ‘experts’ being interviewed by the news agencies were predicting 50,000 American casualties. I wasn’t all that confident I would even make it home alive, so why try writing an actual novel? As it turned out, I did make it back from the war alive (obviously). Once I got back home and things settled down, I pecked out a story about a ‘Wizard Scout’, put it on a floppy disk, and stuck it in a desk drawer. College, jobs, and providing for my family took priority, and although I occasionally pulled out my story and made a few changes, I didn’t try to do anything about getting it published.
Once the last of our four children left home for college, my wife and I found we had a lot more free time. So in the autumn of 2014, I dusted off the story about my ‘Wizard Scout’ and had a copyeditor I knew check it out. I’d been hearing about self-publishing eBooks for years, and I thought what the heck, I’d like to get the story of my ‘Wizard Scout’ out there and share it with other people in case they were interested. Who knows, I thought, maybe some people will like it? As it turned out, my copyeditor took a little longer to review my book than I was expecting (after all, he was doing it for free). He did give me a heads-up that because I already knew every detail of my character’s background in my head, I was not taking the time to explain it in the story. He advised me I really needed to think of a way to let readers see how the story’s protagonist developed into the hero of my book.
So, I let my copyeditor (who happens to be my son-in-law which is why he was helping me out for free in his rare spare time) continue to deplete the red ink in his pen while marking all the typical mistakes made by first time authors in my original story. In the meantime, I began writing ‘Wizard Defiant’ which took my character all the way back to his days as a cadet at the Intergalactic Wizard Scout Academy. My thought process was to let readers see how the protagonist develops into the character in my original story.
Since my copyeditor was nowhere close to finishing his work on my original story, I made the command decision to publish ‘Wizard Defiant (Intergalactic Wizard Scout Chronicles Book 1)’ through Amazon as a Kindle eBook. Amazingly, copies of the book began selling. Even more amazing, most of the readers liked the book and the concept of a wizard scout. I did receive some harsh criticism from a few reviewers. Their comments hurt (hey, authors had better be thick-skinned), but I soon realized several of the ‘bad’ reviews had very good points. Consequently, I’ve tried to not make the same mistakes in the follow-on books in the series.
So, to those reviewers who took the time to point out problem areas in ‘Wizard Defiant’, I give a sincere thank you. I am becoming a better writer because of your comments. I have a long ways to go yet, but I am trying to become a better author. And to those reviewers who took the time to point out the good things about the ‘Wizard Defiant’ and how much you liked it, I say thanks as well. You helped motivate me to keep writing and to improve my skills as an author.
In closing, I’d like to say a big thank you to all the readers who have decided to take the ‘wizard scout’ trek with me. It has been, and I think will continue to be, an adventure. I am very humbled by it all. Thank you.
P.S. If you’ve made it this far, you may be saying to yourself ‘Hey! Whatever happened to the original wizard scout story?’ Well, my copyeditor eventually returned it to me, and once the ‘Intergalactic Wizard Scout Chronicles’ timeline catches up to the original story, it will be published. I am looking forward to that day. I think it’s a very exciting story. And, I really do like the characters; problems and all.
I do have a lot of good tendencies from my time in the military; loyalty and dependability to name a couple. My wife says my good qualities allow her to overlook some of my more irritating military habits such as showing up early for things.
What did I do during my twenty years in the military? Well, I spent my first ten years in the Airborne Infantry (i.e. paratroops) jumping out of perfectly good airplanes and hanging out with other soldiers who liked to do the same. Most of those ten years were a time of relative peace for my country, and I spent all of it at Fort Bragg, North Carolina working my way up through the ranks from buck private to sergeant first class as a platoon sergeant. At that time, paratroopers tended to stay at Fort Bragg for years without having to move, and I had squad and team leaders who I’d gotten as buck privates. Consequently, the leaders in my platoon were very good at working together.
But all things change, and after ten years, I got an itch to try something new. (It could be that I’d gotten married, and being in the Airborne Infantry and spending a lot of time in the field wasn’t as much fun as it had been.) Anyway, I decided to become a helicopter pilot. After ten and a half months of flight school, the Army had a brand-spanking new warrant officer pilot. It was a great rank, and I did so enjoy flying helicopters. (Well, okay. I enjoyed it most of the time. Sometimes we tended to get into dangerous situations, and then it was a case of wishing I was anywhere on the ground instead of up in the air flying.) In 1990, I deployed with my aviation unit to the Persian Gulf. I returned back to the states in 1991 after the war, and I retired shortly thereafter.
But who can retire on half pay when they have a wife and two young children to support? Not me. So with the encouragement and support of my wife, I went to college to get a degree in computer programming. Even with my wife working and the additional money from my GI Bill, our financial situation was tight. By the time I got my computer programming degree two years later our savings account was a big fat zero. However, it all worked out for the best due to a little thing called the Y2K scare. I was blessed in that when I graduated from college in 1993 with the ink still wet on my degree, businesses were hiring computer programmers right and left to modify their computer code to handle the dreaded Y2K programming bug. For those who weren’t alive at the time, the Y2K problem turned out to be not so much of a problem, or…., maybe we computer programmers fixed all the bugs before the year 2000 occurred. For me it didn’t really matter, because by the time the Y2K problem came and went, I was a highly experienced and sought after computer programmer.
In the mid 1990’s I was once again blessed by being in the right place at the right time. One of my managers gave me the opportunity to work in a new programming environment called the Internet creating screens for some newfangled thing called a web browser. Lacking the required skills, I started taking weekend and evening classes at a local community college in HTML, C++, and Java programming languages. That was a rough time for my family and I in that for the next 18 months I pretty much got up in the morning, went to work at my fulltime programming job all day, stopped off for my evening classes on the way home, and finally got home around 10:00 p.m. that night just to start it all over again the next morning. However, it paid off in that the Internet and web programming became the hot commodity of the day, and I was picked up by a computer consulting company. Things were going well.
In 2005, tragedy stuck. My wife of 26 years was diagnosed with cancer. We fought it hard for 10 months, but my wife, Susan, lost the battle in 2006. My children and I were devastated. But God works wonders in people’s lives, and in 2009 I met and married a good woman with two children of her own. Over the intervening years, our two families have blended together, and I love all four of my children and my wife very much. I am very blessed.
So, where does the writing come in? Well…, way back in the Fall/Winter of 1990/1991, I was sitting in a tent out in the middle of the desert waiting to see if my nineteen years of military training was going to be called upon in actual combat. When not flying my helicopter on support missions, I had a lot of free time. So, I started thinking about how I would write a story about a character if he was a mix of technology and magic. I jotted down a few notes, but most of the ideas I just kept in my head. After all, at that time the ‘experts’ being interviewed by the news agencies were predicting 50,000 American casualties. I wasn’t all that confident I would even make it home alive, so why try writing an actual novel? As it turned out, I did make it back from the war alive (obviously). Once I got back home and things settled down, I pecked out a story about a ‘Wizard Scout’, put it on a floppy disk, and stuck it in a desk drawer. College, jobs, and providing for my family took priority, and although I occasionally pulled out my story and made a few changes, I didn’t try to do anything about getting it published.
Once the last of our four children left home for college, my wife and I found we had a lot more free time. So in the autumn of 2014, I dusted off the story about my ‘Wizard Scout’ and had a copyeditor I knew check it out. I’d been hearing about self-publishing eBooks for years, and I thought what the heck, I’d like to get the story of my ‘Wizard Scout’ out there and share it with other people in case they were interested. Who knows, I thought, maybe some people will like it? As it turned out, my copyeditor took a little longer to review my book than I was expecting (after all, he was doing it for free). He did give me a heads-up that because I already knew every detail of my character’s background in my head, I was not taking the time to explain it in the story. He advised me I really needed to think of a way to let readers see how the story’s protagonist developed into the hero of my book.
So, I let my copyeditor (who happens to be my son-in-law which is why he was helping me out for free in his rare spare time) continue to deplete the red ink in his pen while marking all the typical mistakes made by first time authors in my original story. In the meantime, I began writing ‘Wizard Defiant’ which took my character all the way back to his days as a cadet at the Intergalactic Wizard Scout Academy. My thought process was to let readers see how the protagonist develops into the character in my original story.
Since my copyeditor was nowhere close to finishing his work on my original story, I made the command decision to publish ‘Wizard Defiant (Intergalactic Wizard Scout Chronicles Book 1)’ through Amazon as a Kindle eBook. Amazingly, copies of the book began selling. Even more amazing, most of the readers liked the book and the concept of a wizard scout. I did receive some harsh criticism from a few reviewers. Their comments hurt (hey, authors had better be thick-skinned), but I soon realized several of the ‘bad’ reviews had very good points. Consequently, I’ve tried to not make the same mistakes in the follow-on books in the series.
So, to those reviewers who took the time to point out problem areas in ‘Wizard Defiant’, I give a sincere thank you. I am becoming a better writer because of your comments. I have a long ways to go yet, but I am trying to become a better author. And to those reviewers who took the time to point out the good things about the ‘Wizard Defiant’ and how much you liked it, I say thanks as well. You helped motivate me to keep writing and to improve my skills as an author.
In closing, I’d like to say a big thank you to all the readers who have decided to take the ‘wizard scout’ trek with me. It has been, and I think will continue to be, an adventure. I am very humbled by it all. Thank you.
P.S. If you’ve made it this far, you may be saying to yourself ‘Hey! Whatever happened to the original wizard scout story?’ Well, my copyeditor eventually returned it to me, and once the ‘Intergalactic Wizard Scout Chronicles’ timeline catches up to the original story, it will be published. I am looking forward to that day. I think it’s a very exciting story. And, I really do like the characters; problems and all.