Brad Alan Lewis

Where do I begin? Where all good authors start: by eating all the good stuff out of the fridge. Mission accomplished, onto my bio. I am a 100% self-taught writer. I listened to Books-on-Tape for 10,003 hours to learn the craft as best I could. I write because books are the A#1 way to store a complex idea outside one's body. Nothing else comes close. I write because I like to write. It's fun. Sit in a darkened room by yourself, cup of coffee at hand, letting your fingers roam over the keyboard while your mind roams the deep canyons of your dreams. What could be better? I'll tell you what could be better: selling enough books to pay your damn bills. That's would be better. Sorry, getting off track a bit. My writing heroes? Michael Herr, the author of Dispatches. That book, Dispatches, every word in place, every paragraph perfect. Michael Herr wrote only one book. But if done right, one is enough. A Confederate General from Big Sur. Just love that book. Candy, Justine, Hunter Thompson's Hell's Angels, Out of Africa, Razor's Edge, The English Patient, Madame Bovary - all truly outstanding. Same goes for Peter Matthiesson's The Snow Leopard. Pretty obvious that my favorite writers come in all eras, all ages, all shapes and sizes. That gets to the core of why writing is so remarkable: size doesn't matter. Or education, location, wealth, country of birth. Nothing matters. All that matters are the words on the page. Long live books. I think have gotten better over time at writing. That's encouraging to me, to see improvement. A year or so ago I finished a complete re-write of my Olympic rowing saga, Assault on Lake Casitas. I renamed it OLYMPIAN. It's much improved. And as an added bonus, I now sleep better knowing the story is better told. Where do I go from here? We shall see.