About
Gordon Gravley has been making up stories all his life. As a child, they would take the shape of rudimentary comic books, and Super-8 movies. As he was drawn to stage-acting in high school his stories became one-act plays, and then feature-length screenplays - none of which ever saw the light of the big screen.
It wasn't until his thirties that he finally decided to take the plunge, and like a real writer he made his stories into, well...stories. And just like a real writer, his efforts garnished multiple rejection letters. Twenty years later, those efforts would culminate into his first self-published novel, Gospel for the Damned.
Born in Phoenix, Arizona, Gordon moved around - California; Colorado; Alaska; Northern Arizona - before eventually settling in Seattle, Washington. Having called the Northwest his home since 1998, he doesn't expect to be moving elsewhere anytime soon. There, he continues to make up stories, write novels, and lives with his wife, Jenna, and their son, Zane.
Story Behind The Book
I finished writing my first novel, Gospel for the Damned - about a journalist who spends three days within the quarantined city of San Francisco - a little over two years ago. I had developed it from a short story I wrote in 1994, almost thirty years before!
The short story, A Little Reality Never Killed Anyone, is about a group of teens in some kind of dystopian world who play dangerous truth-or-dare games to conquer their fear of living day-to-day. It's not very good. I'm not just saying this to be humble or self-deprecating, it's really not good. (One magazine that rejected my submission wrote - and I'm paraphrasing, only slightly - "We're not interested in your story. We only publish good writing.") But, it was one of the first and few short stories I ever wrote, and I will always cherish it as one of the many, necessary steps I took in becoming a novelist.
For the rest of the story, see my blog post "My First Book" at ggwritinglife.blogspot.com
