I live on a ridge in Southern Indiana with my wife and son.  We enjoy hunting and fishing and spending time together doing different events around the area.  It is a great place to live, and it's a great place to write!

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I have always written stories.  My earliest memories will be in 2nd and 3rd grade in elementary school, but in first grade I won our reading contest.  I loved books and I loved to write.

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In 4th and 5th grade, my teacher let me set up a table and sell my stories for 25 cents each (this would have been 1979-1980).  Not only did I sell stories to the other kids who loved them, but some of my teachers would buy the stories as well...not to show support mind you, but they enjoyed the stories as well.

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In 5th or 6th grade I went to the young Author's convention, with a story Ray Sting and Everything.  It was a story about a secret agent (think of James Bond meets Mission Impossible) on a mission in the jungles of South America.  A teacher had it bound for me (not published) and I believe it was 12 pages long.  If I find the story, I will publish it here in original text for free.  Ironically, if I do find that "book", I want to reboot the series with a modern Ray Sting.

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I continued to write through middle school, and on into my freshman year of high school.  During study hall I wrote a 350-page novel down the lines of J.R.R. Tolkien.  At the end of the school year, I didn't know what to do with this massive folder (it was all hand-written on 8 1/2 x 11 paper) so I threw it in the trash on my last day of study hall - yes, I do regret that decision to this day.  I remember the name of the novel, As the Crow Flies, and the concept, and wish to also reboot it to a more modern time as a published book down the road.

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In my junior year in high school, I wrote a one-page story about an Arabian fighting a desert tribe, it was a brief encounter.  It was the closest thing to a perfect paper I had ever written, with only one slight mistake found by my English teacher.  She was constantly wanting me to write short stories for magazines of that nature, but I never followed through on it.

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Although I did well in college English, and was encouraged by my professors, I only wrote to write good papers for grades.  "Real Life" was setting in and the need to begin focusing on a career took the time away, as well did marriage and a job that paid the bills.  I did little if any writing, at least that I recall, after my junior year in high school.  But the yearn to write was always there burning like a strong flame that I just did not, for whatever reason, follow through on.

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Fast forward some 30 years...yes, that is right, some 30 years.  My son was 5 and he was home schooled - he had a strong engineering mind and even at age 5 the children's books just didn't fit him.  Let's just say, he was not a "see spot run" kid.  He wanted tangible, real, no fantasy stories with action, learning, and logical endings.  Try to find that kind of book for a 5-year-old.  So, I opened the laptop and began penning a chapter a night of what was originally just The Marsh Chronicles.  My son loved it.  As soon as it was finished, I followed with The Sun Also Sets and then a while later, The Message.

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At the completion of The Message, I looked back and thought I had a good book in what was now called The Marsh Adventures:  Of Times and Places.  I submitted it to a publisher, they loved it, and as they say, the rest was history.  One thing in all those 30 years - I would write down story concepts as they came to me, unique ideas and story lines out of the ordinary - so it behooves me to say, I have a lot of writing to do, as I would like to bring all these stories over the past 30 years to life.  

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I am, just a writer on the ridge.

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Steve Patton

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