Guest Post & #Spotlight – The Guild Saga by John Joseph Doody @johnjosephdoody #Fantasy

Why I Wrote The Guild Saga Series

In the late seventies I wrote several poems that grew into an idea for a novel. The book took me a couple of years to write and I should have done my homework on preparing a proper manuscript. Fortunately, friends loved the book even if agents didn’t. I kept it in my closet for many moons. In 1993 I had a short story published and I was disappointed with a lot of things regarding writing and its place in my life. I stopped writing that year. I’m a Christian and I believed back then I needed to give it up and focus on other things more important—I had been married again two years before and we had our first baby that year. Fast forward to 2009. I sat at my desk thinking about our later years and what we would do for a living when our legs gave out, and I said a prayer about it. I sensed maybe it was a good time to go back to writing, so I gathered the family together and told them, then I read my poetry to my kids and told them about books I had written. It was a great moment in my life. My family was totally supportive. I should have told them my muse doesn’t rise until midnight, but I’d forgotten. So now we are a family of night owls.

A month later I got this idea about a tall, handsome pilot, a Guild officer in civvies, taking a shuttle down to an odd planet—a Las Vegas of sorts in the distant galaxy—in order to steal something of great value. I mined my old book for various things and out of that work I got this idea for seven or eight books.

I felt in my gut The Wonk Decelerator would be published once I finished it. I chose the small press route, so I could learn the publishing process. The book was accepted almost immediately, but the publisher went under. I sent a partial to another publisher and received a very positive response and sent in the rest. That publisher also went under! Anyway, eventually the book got published and the publisher is still in business! I have had four Guild books published, though one of them is a very short prequel I did for laughs at my publisher’s request and is only available in ebook. The other three are available in ebook and paperback.

I’ve come full circle now and I’m back to looking for an agent for my current book (unrelated to the Guild books), The Dark—a supernatural, sci-fi suspense novel. Apparently, you’re not supposed to call them horror stories nowadays.