Blog post Number 41 Written: 07-10-2021 Uploaded: 12-23-2022
Since I was recently talking about other authors, how they influenced me and how I feel about them, I figured I’d do another, more recent author. One that I met since getting published and have a more recent and informed memory of. I met Johnathan Mayberry. He came to my town for a convention and stopped by for the meeting with my writers’ group before the convention started. I sat next to him in a small café with about ten other local writers from our group. He had a nice sandwich, it came with all the fixings. tomatoes, lettuce, onions, fries. Why I remember that I don’t know. He lectured us about his writing process, and how he goes about getting edited, and so on. Regular writer advice, good stuff, from a more experienced and sage author with many published books. I was literally rubbing elbows and talking shop with this man for roughly an hour.
It wasn’t until another week or so later when relating the events to a co-worker and the co-worker knew who Johnathan Mayberry was, that I learned the caliber of the author I was causally sharing sandwiches with. It was then that I borrowed Mayberry’s books from my co-worker. I didn’t read the smaller side stories, but I read the main books of the Joe Ledger series. I guess they’re technically sci-fi but I think of them as action books. It was several… like six books? Let me look it up real quick… ten… it was ten books. Didn’t feel like that many books. It went so fast, was packed with so much action and mayhem it didn’t feel like that much reading.
The Joe ledger books were packed with action, gore, plots for world domination and I thought were great adventure stories. Each book had its own kind of… main theme, but by the end of the series, it did start to feel formulaic. That’s not nessicarily a gad thing. They were all good books, don’t get me wrong there. My biggest complaint is that there are many big subjects, things that are touched on, mentioned, but not explored, and it made sense to me, but someone who doesn’t already have that innate knowledge might not understand. Big stuff, deep rabbit holes around the arcane, the conspiracy theory tinfoil hat-wearing stuff. There was at least one instance where the wrong word for a thing was used, but after speaking with Jonathan, I am pretty sure that was an intentional misuse to water the books down for the general public that isn’t so familiar with certain bits of technology. Having spoken to the man, and knowing his background and knowledge base, I can say that the choreography for all the hand-to-hand combat in the books, is the real deal and the author know’s what he’s talking about.
Now that I have said about loud, my thoughts on the probably intentional misuse of vocabulary to make the books more palatable for the general public, I suspect that’s why the other subjects that require a thicker tinfoil hat were not covered in more detail, because that would A have changed the pace and bring up the action too much and made the waters too deep for those who wanted to swim but weren’t willing to go to the bottom of the well. The book series has got something for everyone. Alien, zombies, mutants, plague, super-rich Villians secret societies, super-soldiers some Lovecraftian monsters, and even a cute cat.
My take away from the discussion with the author and from having read his books, in order to try and reach my dream of being a full-time author is not to do anything different, but to do more of it. More of everything. More writing, more advertising, more editing, more violence, more action, more sci-fi.
Also, they were good books, so if you can pick them up, and enjoy a good bar brawl, I recommend them. Be small, and fuzzy, and gopher it.
Chace Randolph 