"I see things that never were and say, why not?"

Hi everyone, Ryan let me take over his site for the moment and…

*laughs manically while stroking my beard*

Ryan asked me why I write and how I got started. The answer is simple, yet complex, inspiring, and at the same time just like everyone else… but the answer is the same for both questions.

I see things that never were and say, “Why not?”

It’s my mantra, or my personal life-quote. If I had a shield with a family crest emblazoned in the center, this would be the motto.

It’s my take on a quote by Robert F. Kennedy. “Some men see things as they are and ask, “Why?” I dream of things that never were and ask, “Why not?” Good quote, you may have seen it in

the Star Trek Tech Manual for the Next Generation Enterprise. I am a sucker for fictional tech manuals, and Art of books.

Back to the quote though, it’s true. I am a dreamer. A storyteller. I love words, and can even put them together in interesting ways sometimes. My earliest memories are of telling stories. I played with G.I. Joe and Star Wars figures, and sent them on amazing adventures. It’s an only child thing. Then in elementary school, my creative writing teacher had us making a book each year. We wrote stories, illustrated the pages, and she bound them. Eventually, I would travel to schools telling stories, and success in the theater made me want to write for the rest of my life.

I could never count the thousands of stories, characters, and scenes, I’ve imagined over the years. Only equate it to a waterfall, always flowing and thinking, each idea continuously crashing down on the rocks below. Some ideas make rainbows, others are simply lost to time.

I write to tell stories, and words are my medium.

As for why I wrote The Iron Chronicles… a vision… airships firing broadsides at each other in a cloudy sky. Alexander, Genevieve, and fantastical mechanical monsters soon followed. I’d known about steampunk for years, and loved that the genre allowed me to mix history and fantasy. I wrote Iron Horsemen and was lucky to have my dream brought to reality when it was published.

Being a writer means being a dreamer.

Brad R. Cook, author of the young adult steampunk series,

The Iron Chronicles (Treehouse Publishing Group), will see the release of book three, Iron Lotus, in November 2016. A former co-publisher and acquisitions editor for Blank Slate Press, he is a member of SCBWI, and currently serves as Historian of St. Louis Writers Guild after three and half years as President. A founding contributor to The Writers’ Lens, a resource blog for writers, he can be heard weekly as a panelist on Write Pack Radio. He learned to fence at thirteen, and never set down his sword, but prefers to curl up with his cat and a centuries’ old classic. Find more @bradrcook on Twitter, Instagram, and tumblr. BradRCook.com