Getting to Know Bestselling Author
S.L. Shelton
Where were you born?
I was born in Fredericksburg Virginia,
1966.
Where
did you grow up?
I grew up in Spotsylvania County, just
outside of Fredericksburg. We were surrounded by Civil War battlefields, so I
knew a bit more about the military than I did about almost anything else by the
time I started school.
Tell
me a little about your family.
I have two brothers and a sister, all
younger. I was a horrible big brother and wasn’t much of a positive influence
on any of them, but I was always quick to jump in to defend them if anyone else
tried to harm them. My mother was an artist and gave me the space and resources
to develop my own artistic gifts. My father worked for Space Surveillance at
the Naval Surface Weapons Command in Dahlgren.
Where
did you go to high school?
I went to high school in Spotsylvania and
excelled in the sciences, but not much else. I was in high school when the MNF
barracks was bombed in Beirut, killing more than 200 US service men. I became
obsessed with serving at that time and left high school before graduating to
enlist (something that was still allowed at the time).
Tell
me about your time in the service.
I left high school and enlisted as soon as
I was of legal age to do so. My recruiter was hesitant to sign me up with no
diploma, but when my entrance exam results (ASVAB) were returned, he changed
his tune and said I could pretty much choose whatever job I wanted. To this day,
I will always remember my response: “I want to blow shit up.” So, I became a
combat engineer (12B). I remained a line unit combat engineer in a Sapper
Battalion for a couple of years, then gained notice from a Light Fighter
detachment NCO when I taught a class on basic mountaineering. (I had been an avid
climber since my teen years.) He asked my battalion if they could use me as a
trainer for a few cycles. After I returned, my battalion offered me a job as
Battalion Operations Specialist. There I honed my skills as a teacher and
communicator, honoring the long time unofficial trainer credo: “Make it grunt
proof”, meaning break everything down to its simplest components and explain it
so that even the biggest idiot can understand. The military perfected the
method of relaying complex ideas to even the simplest of minds. I became
skilled in communicating in the same way. I completed my Training NCO courses,
expanded my skill set, developed innovative practices and lesson plans and
eventually got my GED before starting college, taking classes in the evenings when
duty allowed. By the early 90s I was married and had a son. For personal
reasons, I left the service at the end of an enlistment cycle. I had just been
asked if I would consider going to OCS (Officer’s Candidate School) by my company
commander when my first marriage ended. In an irresponsible young man’s manner,
I tossed everything, and after nearly a decade in the service, let my
enlistment expire, going back to my hometown to sulk. I still regret not going
to OCS and often, sometimes daily, regret not continuing in the service.
Tell
me about your career once you’d left the service:
By the time I had left the service I had
become quite skilled in the use of the computer: programming, and (oddly) HTML
due to the primary system used by the military at the time. The World Wide Web
was in its infancy and I found myself in the unique position of having a sought
after skill set. I worked as a trainer for several tech companies until ending
up the head of education for a large internet provider. There I made
connections that allowed me to start my own business. For the next decade and a
half, I built a system, automating one of the most miserable manual processes
in business travel; the annual Transient Hotel Request for Proposal. Fortune
500 companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year on transient
hotel costs, and the process of getting the best deal was negotiated
individually each year. This used to be a manual process. I built a system that
automated most of the process on both the hotel and the corporate end. After we
had captured the business of most major travel agencies, my partner and I sold
the business in 2011. For the decades
after the service, I relied on outside distractions to satisfy my creative
desires. I became a photographer, a public access TV producer, sculptor,
painter, wood worker, and finally, after selling my company, I began what had
been a lifelong desire to write.
When
did you realize you wanted to write?
When I was still in the service I had a
dream. It was a vivid dream and I remember it to this day as clearly as on the
night it happened. It was odd because I didn’t usually have vivid dreams, but
on the three occasions I remember them, they all revolved around my
grandfather, who became my father figure after my own father left the family.
In this particular dream, my grandfather came to me (years after his death)
while I was hiding from someone. The hiding dream wasn’t unusual, and many
times after coming out of the field from tactical operations I had that dream ...
sometimes even to this day. But my grandfather rolled up to the side of the
road in an old car and opened the back door for me. He told me to keep my head
down as he drove us. We were on the road for a long time, and he wouldn’t talk
to me, he just smiled. When we stopped he opened the door for me and we were in
front of a book store. He took me in and we wandered the aisles for a while. He
came to a halt in front of a table with stacks of a bestselling new release. I
remember the name of the book, though I won’t share it here as I’ve never used the
title before. It wasn’t until he smiled and walked away that I realized the
author was me. It was my name on the book. Without another word, he took me
back to the car and we drove away. Despite my many questions, I never got a
word out of him. I was twenty-two or twenty-three when that happened. I’ve
wanted to write the great American thriller ever since. In 2012, after severely
re-spraining my ankle, I sat down and began writing the Scott Wolfe Series.
What
was the first book you published and when did that take place?
The first book I published was Waking Wolfe on November 19, 2013. The
original title was A Lamb in Wolfe’s
Clothing, but I realized after its release that it wasn’t “thrillery”
enough. So, when I released the third novel in the series, I changed the title
of book one and two, along with heavy rewrites to bring up the quality of the
story.
How
did the character of Scott Wolfe come about?
Scott Wolfe was born from a Gotye
song. The first time I heard “Somebody
That I Used to Know”, it inspired a story in which a young man had to decide if
he was going to put himself in danger to rescue a person he was no longer in a
relationship with. The story quickly developed into an international thriller.
When
did you become a bestselling author?
The first time I was on the Amazon
bestseller’s list was during a free promotion shortly after I released Waking Wolfe, but I didn’t achieve
consistent bestseller ranking until February 2015. On my wedding anniversary, I
discovered that all four (four at that time) Scott Wolfe Novels were in the top
100 Political Thriller Bestsellers, and the ranks just grew from there. By the
time I released the fifth novel in the series, all of my books were top twenty
political thrillers and I was ranked a top 100 Thriller author. Those rankings
stayed very consistent with all the Scott Wolfe books having been top fives at
one point or another until my wife Diane became ill in late summer of 2015. We
didn’t discover until early 2016 that her illness was being caused by stage
four metastasized squamous cell carcinoma. By then my attention had shifted
away from writing to caring for my wife.
Tell
me about Hedged. How is it different
than the Scott Wolfe series? Why did
you decide to write it?
I wrote Hedged in a period of about three weeks, beginning on the day my father was buried. I had been estranged from my father for a few years when he died, and the emotion behind our unresolved issues came pouring out in fictional thriller form. There isn’t much in the way of biography to the story, but the emotion behind our issues conveyed well in the story. I found it therapeutic. This was the last novel I finished prior to my wife’s diagnosis of cancer. Hedged was meant to be nothing more than an emotional outlet for anger and grief; a fictional testament to what happens to otherwise normal people when family isn’t an ideal environment growing up.
Tell
me about your personal life:
I’m married to Diane Shelton. We met in
2003, married in 2005 and see ourselves as living in a modern fairytale love
story. This is my third marriage. I have one son from my first marriage and she
has two daughters from hers. We’ve taken each other’s children as our own and
raised them as one family. All three children have graduated from college and
have started their lives with great gusto, each choosing different, exciting paths
to follow. I remain a full-time professional author, as well as full-time
amateur care giver to my wife. She is currently receiving no treatment as her
cancer did not achieve remission before chemo stopped working. We wait,
receiving quarterly PET scans, to decide a course forward.
__________________________________________________________
Visit SLShelton.com
Bibliography:
Waking Wolfe
(originally titled A Lamb in Wolfe’s Clothing)
Publisher
(Kindle): Amazon Digital Services LLC
November 19, 2013
Publisher (Print): CreateSpace Independent Publishing
Platform (November 21, 2013)
Scott Wolfe Book 1
Unexpected Gaines
(originally titled Second Amendment Remedies)
Publisher
(Kindle): Amazon Digital Services LLC
February 12, 2014
Publisher (Print): CreateSpace Independent Publishing
Platform (February 19, 2014)
Scott Wolfe Book 2
Publisher
(Kindle): Amazon Digital Services LLC May
22, 2014
Publisher (Print): CreateSpace Independent Publishing
Platform; 1 edition (May 22, 2014)
Scott Wolfe Book 3
Publisher
(Kindle): Amazon Digital Services LLC
November 15, 2014
Publisher (Print): CreateSpace Independent Publishing
Platform (November 17, 2014)
Scott Wolfe Book 4
Publisher
(Kindle): Amazon Digital Services LLC
May 12, 2015
Publisher (Print): CreateSpace Independent Publishing
Platform (May 11, 2015)
Scott Wolfe Book 5
Publisher
(Kindle): Amazon Digital Services LLC November
17, 2015
Publisher (Print): CreateSpace Independent Publishing
Platform (November 16, 2015)
Scott Wolfe Book 6
Splinter
Self
Scott Wolfe Book 7
Scheduled
to release Late 2016, but delayed due to family medical issues.
Publication Date:
Amazon Digital Services LLC December 24, 2013
Stand Alone Back Story Novella in
the Scott Wolfe Universe
Publisher (Kindle):
Amazon Digital Services LLC July 26, 2016
Publisher
(Print):
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (July 27, 2016)
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