Video 1 Transcript
So, inspirational stories. This was the one that I was told that I needed to do the most, and I'll tell you why. So, I was trying to spend a full life in the United States military. I served for 15 years until I was severely injured, and I could no longer serve. I was medically retired, and I kind of thought the life that I had planned out for myself was over. And I speak seven languages, and so I thought, you know, I could go be a college professor and teach some foreign languages. So, then I started going to school to become a college professor, and then COVID hit and shut down the college. So, I was like, oh man, what am I going to do? What's next in my life? Then my wife was like, hey, why don't you write that book series? And now, I'm a six-figure author.
Video 2 Transcript
Because I write for teens, I do get a lot of fan mail. Now, some of it's really funny and cute and wonderful, but then some of it kind of touches you as an author, and you realize the importance that you have as an author. For me, it's the ones where the girls or the boys tell me that their lives have been saved because of my books. It's quite a heavy load. You realize you have to take everything a little bit more seriously. I had one book, Rapunzel, in it. The prince came and saved her, and I realized so many girls don't have princes, and I actually stopped production on that book and went back to chapter eight and rewrote it all over again from where I realized she has to save herself. What you might not understand is in Rapunzel, she deals with depression. She's watched her family die. She's watched the guy she loves die, and she just thinks that she's an awful person. But in my book, she has to save herself.
