About the author

Tony Bertauski

<p>I grew up in the Midwest where the land is flat and the corn is tall. The winters are bleak and cold. I hated winters.</p><p>I always wanted to write. But writing was hard. And I wasn&rsquo;t very disciplined. The cold had nothing to do with that, but it didn&rsquo;t help.&nbsp;That changed in grad school.</p><p>After several attempts at a proposal,&nbsp; my major advisor was losing money on red ink and advised me to figure it out. Somehow, I did.</p><p>After grad school, my wife and my two very little children moved to the South in Charleston, South Carolina where the winters are spring and the summers are a sauna (cliche but dead accurate). That&rsquo;s when I started teaching and writing articles for trade magazines. I eventually published two textbooks on landscape design. I then transitioned to writing a column for the Post and Courier. They were all great gigs, but they weren&rsquo;t fiction.</p><p>That was a few years later.</p><p>My daughter started reading before she could read, pretending she knew the words in books she propped on her lap. My son was a different story. In an attempt to change that, I began writing a story with him. We made up a character, gave him a name, and something to do. As with much of parenting, it did not go as planned. But the character got stuck in my head.</p><p>He wanted out.</p><p>A few years later, Socket Greeny was born. It was a science fiction trilogy that was gritty and thoughtful. That was 2005.</p><p>I have been practicing Zen since I was 23 years old. A daily meditator, I wanted to instill something meaningful in my stories that appeals to a young adult crowd as well as adult. I hadn&rsquo;t planned to write fiction, didn&rsquo;t even know if I had anymore stories in me after Socket Greeny.</p><p>Turns out I did.</p>