This is Val Campbell. I am the author of the Gary Booker novel series: Operation Austin, Operation Vegas, Operation Seattle, The Husband Whisperer and soon to be Julienne Begins Again.
I wanted to share with you how I got started writing. I'd love to tell you that I received some tablets of stone with writing on them or some ordnance from above, but the truth is I just sat down one October and started writing about some of my experiences dealing with corruption in government and organized crime, and not-so-organized criminals. I have some friends that are mercenaries that have had some very adventuresome lives rescuing victims, trafficking victims, and especially my friend John, who's quite a legendary character in that world of mercenaries and security consultants. We've often talked about writing some of these stories down, and so I just sat down and started. After a couple of weeks, I had about 10 chapters put together, and I thought, "Gee, I wonder if there's something here?" because I'd never written a novel before. I didn't. I was just writing stories down. Right? And I got it just poured out of me. So I sent about 10 chapters to a diverse group of friends and asked them to read through them. They got back with some really great responses like, "GM's up all night reading!" or "Where's the rest of the chapters? Ready because I'm so excited!" What really surprised me was what happened afterwards because other people started getting a hold of me, people who had heard what I was writing about, and they were telling me their stories of being trafficked or abused or prostituted. I started getting a sense for how broad-based this was in our society, much more than I realized, because people don't tell those stories. It's too painful. It's too embarrassing. They don't want to have people know what those experiences were from their childhood or from their, you know, teenage years. They wanted their stories told through this group of characters, stories that they couldn't tell themselves. And so this became a mission for me to tell people what is happening with our teenagers and how they're being groomed and manipulated to be preyed upon.
I started writing these books: Operation Austin, Operation Vegas, Operation Seattle, and The Husband Whisperers: Sarah Story, You can go to Amazon and pick those up if you like a really good read: adventure and romance and sex and violence, the kind that's appropriate to the people that are really actually living those lives and doing those things, what actually happens to them and what they're doing, and of course expressed through some fiction characters.
I hope you fall in love with these characters as much as I have, and I hope you enjoy reading these books as much as I've enjoyed writing them. This is Val Campbell.