About The Author

Did you come to this page on purpose? You know there are places on this website that talk about robot apocalypses and stuff, right? This is the page about me, Evan Graham, the science fiction author. I go through all this trouble to write all these stories about adventure and terror on alien worlds, and you want to hear me talk about the boring life I write these books to escape from? Meh. I don’t get it. But you’re here, so go ahead and pull up a seat. I will indulge you. Just don’t expect much. 

Hello. My name is Evan Graham. I am, among many things, a writer, although that word doesn’t fully encapsulate my experiences with story-crafting. “Junkie” might be a better term. I am absolutely ravenous for stories, and have been all my life. I love them. I love hearing them, I love sharing them, and I love the pseudo-life they take on inside your head, where the seed a story plants in your imagination can bloom in a hundred unpredictable ways.

A lot of people outgrow the universal childhood desire to build and explore elaborate fantastical worlds in our imaginations. I never did, and I never will. Sure I’ve come a long way since challenging my friends to lightsaber battles with sticks, and my worldbuilding has become deeper, more elaborate, and more mature, but it hasn’t lost an ounce of its earnest realness, its personal emotional investment. The worlds, stories, and characters I create are so alive in my mind every minute of the day that putting them down on the page is something of a moral imperative to me. These stories are so real to me, I feel I have a personal responsibility to make them real to everyone else. 

The first stories I ever wrote were a series of Star Wars comic books I “wrote” together with my dad. By “wrote,” I mean he did 100% of the actual writing, and I just drew all the pictures. After a while, he encouraged me to start writing AND illustrating them (which was definitely him encouraging me to expand my creativity and not at all because he was tired of doing all the hard work while I drew pictures), and I took him up on the challenge. Suddenly, I was both writing and illustrating all my own stories, and pouring quite a bit of creativity into them. Granted, they were still all Star Wars stories, but eventually my dad encouraged me to try writing something totally original. Reluctantly, I did step out of my comfort zone and started creating stories that were completely and entirely the product of my own imagination. To this day, I think “Why don’t you try telling your own story?” is the single most influential thing my father ever said to me. Without that piece of advice, I wouldn’t be here right now, describing myself on a website dedicated entirely to my writing. Thanks for that, Dad. 

Anyway, my first stories were garbage. 

I don’t know what else you expect from me, I was a preteen kid. I knew how grammar worked, and I knew how to piece together themes and plots from other stories I liked, but I didn’t know the first thing about effective story crafting. The skills were there, but they were raw, unfocused, untrained. I wrote constantly through high school, and while those stories were still not strictly good, they were growing more and more creative. Where once I was basically just copying and pasting bits out of other stories I liked and swapping the casts out with my original characters, now I was weaving together more complex plots, featuring intrigue, mystery, and interweaving narratives. My talent was still very raw, and mostly self-taught, but it was clearly maturing as I did.

Then, I finally made it to college at Kent State, and I stayed there for a long time. Seriously, it took my nine years to graduate with a bachelors, just because I couldn’t make up my mind what I actually wanted to do with my life. I switched majors four or five times, and ended up with a degree in a field I wouldn’t even end up going into. Throughout all those years of uncertainty, though, I still knew I needed to enrich my experience with stories. I took classes in classic literature, participated in the theatre program, and, of course, enrolled in several creative writing courses. I knew the odds were against finding a viable career in theatre or writing, but that honestly didn’t even matter. I wanted to learn about stories. I wanted to learn their history, their mechanics, the hidden secrets that give them power.  

I had a lot of excellent professors at Kent, but I want to single out three. Dr. Daniel-Raymond Nadon was the head of the theatre program while I was attending classes at the Trumbull campus, and his brilliant ability to make the most complex parts of dramaturgy and the acting process intuitively accessible taught me some of the most valuable lessons I ever learned about how to get inside the mind and world of a character.  

Dr. Peter Byrne gave some of the best lectures about classic literature I’ve ever experienced. His passion for the works he covered was contagious, and he had an uncanny ability to draw you deeper into the text than you ever would have thought you could go. You can legitimately feel yourself growing smarter during one of his lectures, like his words are activating dormant neurotransmitters in your brain. I also got to wrestle him in a stage production of Tartuffe one time, and most people can’t say that about their English professors. 

Lastly, I have to single out Dr. Noelle Bowles, who taught some of my other favorite literature classes. More importantly, though, she played the single biggest role in the development of my writing career as it exists today. 

Way back in 2012, I started work on what I had naïvely thought at the time would be a simple short story for a creative writing project for one of Dr. Bowles’ classes. At that point, it had been a few years since I had written anything; my school workload and grown-up job had eaten up all the time and energy I used to have for my creative writing pursuits, and I had matured enough at that point to realize how sophomoric the quality of my earlier writing was. Lacking the desire to continue the books I had written up to that point and any inspiration for future works, I might have given up on writing for good at that point. And yet that simple writing assignment gripped me in a way I didn’t expect. I’d come up with a brand new concept, and had finally developed the skillset to do it justice. I went above and beyond what was called for for the class assignment, and what had been meant to be a simple short story quickly evolved into the first few chapters of a novel. I got an A on that assignment, but also felt a deep sense of personal achievement. I realized I still had way more stories in me than I’d thought, and that they actually had the potential to be good. 

Then I promptly did nothing at all with that story for two years. 

I still had a lot of school to get through, and wasn’t the best at time management, so that story kind of got shoved under the bed until my final year rolled around. By that year, I already knew I wasn’t going to pursue a career in the field I was studying, but I felt like after 9 years it made sense to just go ahead and round off whatever degree I could get with the massive pile of credits I’d accumulated. I talked to an advisor, and found out I could graduate by December with a BS in Education Studies and a triple minor in English, Writing, and Theatre if I took a handful of classes to round out each thing. To complete that Writing minor, all I had to do was come up with a senior-level independent creative writing project. I went to Dr. Bowles and asked her if I could finish that novel I’d started with her two years ago for class credit, and that’s exactly what we did. 

It was a whirlwind semester for a lot of reasons, but writing a full novel for class credit during my final semester of college was absolutely wild. Writing takes an awful lot of time, which is a rare commodity for a graduating senior. And yet, I thrive under pressure, and the knowledge that this novel stood between me and graduation gave me all the incentive I needed to finish it. Realistically, I don’t know if I would have ever finished writing that book if it hadn’t been needed for a grade. It could have been left untouched forever without that one piece of external motivation to push me through. But I did it. Even though I had to pull two all-nighters to write the final 40 pages of the book before the assignment was due. But there it was: my first grown-up novel. 

Tantalus Depths was born. 

I was incredibly proud of the work I had done, and so was Dr. Bowles. She and Dr. Byrne, who also gave his feedback on the assignment at the end, both strongly encouraged me to seek professional publication for it. For the first time, I felt like I had actually written something worth publishing, too. But the publishing world is not friendly to newcomers. The querying process is daunting and discouraging, and for the next two years, it hung in limbo. 

Then, in 2016, I saw an opportunity. Inkshares, a publisher with a hybrid crowdfunding publication model, hosted a contest for hard science fiction novels,  the three winners earning a full publication deal. Tantalus Depths fit the contest perfectly, and even though I was still nervous about the idea, I finally took the plunge. I did not win the contest, (though I came in fifth place, which is not too shabby). But instead of growing disheartened by the loss, I grew more determined, dedicating myself to gather the full 750 pre-orders necessary to earn a publishing deal without winning the contest. 

Long, grueling, exhausting story short, I did it. I crowdfunded my way to a full publishing deal not once, but twice, going through the whole ordeal again with my second novel, Proteus, a year later. It took a heavy toll on me, but it also gave me the chance to network with dozens of other extremely talented authors. I’ve made some incredible friendships with some of the most brilliant creative minds you could ever hope to meet through that community, and a lot of us still collaborate on exciting projects to this day. 

Now that I had a full publishing deal, I was in for a major awakening regarding exactly what that meant. As proud as I was of Tantalus Depths, and as far as my skills had advanced when I wrote it, it was still the work of an amateur. In my insolent hubris, I thought it would be on bookshelves in less than two years.  

What followed instead was a gauntlet of development edits more rigorous than anything I’d ever experienced in my life. While it was often discouraging to go through eight or nine more drafts of a story I thought I had finished already, I could still tell through every step in the process that my skills were sharpening each time. Those development edits were a crucible for me, refining my talent with every round. The result after all that hard work was a book and an author that were both ten times better than they had been at the beginning, and I can’t say the trials weren’t well worth it. 

I could have left my writing skills dormant while I waded through those seemingly endless rounds of edits, but I didn’t. I kept my writing skills sharp as I developed my editing skills, writing and publishing new short stories at least once a year throughout the process. I didn’t want to get used to the idea of not writing, now that my talents had matured and my passion had been awakened. I’m as proud of my short stories as I am of any of my novels, and have had the honor of seeing my work published alongside the writings of some truly incredible authors. 

And that brings us to where we are today, just a few months away from Tantalus Depths’ long-anticipated publication day. This is where it gets real. I’m confident in my work, but there really are no guarantees in this industry, so who knows how far this thing is really going to go? All I know is a lifetime love of writing has turned me into a heck of an author, with a brain full of worlds I can’t wait to show you. Those worlds are coming out whether you’re ready for them or not, and they’re not stopping anytime soon. 

Okay. I’m done talking about myself. Seriously, though, I don’t know why you’re here. There’s way cooler stuff on this website. Go read the article on my fictional future history of the Earth or something, I spent a lot of time on that one and did some very mean things to Australia for your entertainment.