Where do you live?
I currently make my home in Utah on account of there being about 300% more sun than where I grew up and an inversely proportional amount less of rain. You might be thinking "Seattle!" right now, but no, even more grey and wet. I grew up in rural Southeast Alaska, and moved to Utah when I was done with college.
Why? Well, at the time rent was cheap, and it has some great mountain biking. Plus again, more sun, less rain.
What’s your home life like?
I tend to keep pretty busy even when not at work. Biking and gaming tend to be my main hobbies, but there's also time for hanging out with my friends.
I do spend a lot of my spare time learning about new things or trying new stuff out. Ideas come from exposure to the new, so there's a lot of sense in doing two things at once: Having fun and giving myself some good ideas for the next writing project.
And of course, there's usually time for reading. What genre(s) do you like to write? To read?
Science-Fiction and Fantasy. Both writing and reading. Not so surprising, I'd imagine, though I don't exclusively read just Sci-Fi/Fantasy. I'll pick up a non-fiction work if it's interesting, or read the occasional techno thriller (though if you ask me, publishers and bookstores can say what they want, but Crichton is still Science-Fiction).
But at the end of the day, if I'm picking up a book I've probably circled back to the Fantasy/Sci-Fi settings I enjoy the most. I like forays into different worlds and places, the unexplained or the possible future. It's fun, to both read and write about.
Plus I'm one of those folks that holds that just because the story might be set on another world doesn't mean we can't learn something from it. People still have struggles, have to think fast or carefully, face fears, and run up against conflict. I'd even say that Fantasy and Science-Fiction are, in my opinion, sometimes more real than a lot of other works. Why did you start writing?
Sands, I've been writing for ... a long, long time. Since I was a kid, actually. I used to fill notebooks with ideas and short concepts, all out of a love of stories, experiences, and worlds. I wanted to share those with people. At the time I had my vision set on doing writing and design for games, so while I wrote and took English course after English course (in addition to a lot of other stuff) that was the goal.
Ultimately, and for reasons I won't go into here, the game development obviously didn't work out. But I'd always kept writing and wanting to tell stories about these characters and their worlds. Better yet, all that education work I'd done crafting worlds, settings, characters, and a gripping plot applied just as well to anything that had a story, and I'd always wanted to publish a book anyway ... So when I finished up yet another writing project, this one a novella, and a few friends that read it proclaimed that they'd really enjoyed it and hey maybe I should sell this because they'd have paid money for it, one thing led to another.
What do you do when you’re not writing?
I love biking and gaming. Mountain biking specifically. There's just something great about climbing up a trail over hours and reaching the top. I'm a varied gamer as well, mostly video games, but in the last few years I've finally had the chance to get into tabletop and board games as well and both are a lot of fun. I've even run a tabletop campaign (which was a lot of work but great fun).
Most of the time when I hit my quota for the day and take a step back, I'll take a short break and then—daylight permitting—head outside for a ride, or grab a controller and load up something from Steam. Do some reading. Watch a movie. See if my friends would like to do something. Or maybe do some chores that have been stacking up while I've been chained to my keyboard.
Where do you like to go when looking for a new book to read?
Two places, really. The first is the local library. Love libraries, been a patron since I was a little kid, and there's not better place to go wander around looking for something to read.
I also tend to browse online forums dealing with books, both to talk about them (and writing) but also because people online can recommend some pretty good ones I may never have heard of, often from indie authors or folks who haven't really had a chance to be well-known yet. You never know when you're going to find your next favorite!
At what point do you call it quits when reading a new book?
*Laughs* Actually, I hardly ever do anymore. A wise author (or at least wise in that moment if nothing else) once told me that he finished even the awful books he read because if nothing else it was an exercise in spotting where and how they went wrong, which could then be used to extrapolate into "How could I have fixed it."
In other words, if I find a book that's bad only rarely do I give up on it. Instead, I'll try and push through it as an educational experience. Why am I not enjoying it? What's tripping me up?
But sometimes, occasionally I'll get one that despite that just grinds me to a halt. If I've been reading it long enough that I've got a growing backlog, have renewed it several times from the library, or realize that I'm willingly doing ANYTHING other than reading when I sit down to read ... it's time to dump it. That doesn't happen often, but it's memorable when it does. Are you independently or traditionally published?
I'm independently published. Personally, I'm convinced that as with the music, movie, and game industries, independently published content is the future. Don't get me wrong, traditional-style publishing is never going away, just like record labels didn't entirely disappear when the indie music scene rose, but rather that both traditional and independent will be fully equal options in the future. It'll just depend on what each author wants out of being published.
As for me, I got in during the earlier days of Amazon (but not the earliest). I was pretty new to it, but with some Google searches it wasn't hard to find an editor, a cover artist, and some guides to getting your book published through Amazon. Since then I've learned a lot about the process and the industry, and I've not regretted all the work I've done with each and every title.
I chose indie because I like being the one at the helm of my writing. I'd looked at publishers, looked how they ran and operated, and decided I wanted to be in control of my own content pipeline. I never could have gotten published traditionally with my first two books (both Urban Fantasy Mysteries) and then turned around and said "Hey, I'm going to do Science-Fiction Epic now!" Even with a pen name I would likely still have been told "no" the way things were then in the industry. But as an independent, I can do what I want. If I want to take a quick break and write a book about a dragon becoming a banker, I can (I also did). It's on me whether or not that has an audience and succeed or fails. So far, though, that's going pretty good. How many books/stories have you published so far?
Seven! A number of much significance!
Okay, it's more significant than most realize, because I don't do small either. I mentioned "Epic" above, right? Well, go ahead and underline it. In caps. "One Drink" and "Dead Silver" were normal enough, but "Colony?" "Shadow of an Empire?" Each thousand-page behemoths. "Jungle," the sequel to "Colony" was 458,000 words.
And reviewers still point out they blew through it in a few days. Sands, that was the one where my editing team hit a 35,000 word chapter and commented at the end that it had gone by so quickly they hadn't even noticed. One wondered if it maybe needed to be longer. So yeah, seven books out there bear my name, with more coming each year. What book/story are you currently promoting or working on?
I'll start with what I'm working on right now, because it's a bit experimental. I've been doing an episodic story called "Fireteam Freelance" that I've been posting to my site, episode by episode, as its written. It's been a little different doing things that way, and making it "episodes with an arc" instead of just one big story, but it's a fun project to work on.
Plus, it's free on my site, which means fans are getting access to it instantly each time a new episode goes up. It's pulling in new readers with each episode as well, and I look forward to seeing how it all shakes out and what sort of takeaways I and my fans get out of it. Promoting though, that'd be my last big release, "Jungle." The bigger, heftier sequel to "Colony," "Jungle" dropped last November to a horde of curious hungry readers and hasn't disappointed. What’s the elevator pitch?
"Jungle" picks up where "Colony" left off, with the Trio on their way back to Earth from the colony-world of Pisces.
They don't make it. Instead, they find themselves divided and sent out among the stars once more by a new employer, this time to keep them quiet while events on Pisces smooth over.
Maybe a little too quiet. As they each settle into their new roles—Sweets working to identify the source of a cyberattack aboard a military cruiser, Jake and Anna protecting a team of scientists analyzing a newly-discovered world—things start getting ... weird, strange oddities and bizarre happenstance adding up in confusing and alarming ways. Then deadly ones. Maybe none of them were meant to come back at all. And what happened on Pisces might pale in comparison to what's coming next ... 
PHEW! Pretty hard to drop a pitch for a sequel without spoiling the entire mystery and ending of the first entry. Well, outside of the trio living to the end, anyway.
Meanwhile, "Fireteam Freelance" (the episodic story I'm working on now) takes place in the same setting, but on Earth during the events of "Jungle" and following a small mercenary team that starts getting picked up for some pretty strange jobs ... How long have you been working on it?
"Jungle" took me a year and a few months. 12 months of writing, and about 4 months of editing 12+ hours a day. Blistering pace, but worth it!
"Fireteam Freelance" I started writing the last week of February, so about a month. Just a couple of episodes in at this point. If you've noticed a gap there, that's because between the release of "Jungle" and starting on "Freelance" I wrote another novel called "Axtara - Banking and Finance" that'll probably drop later this year. Seriously, I write a lot. When will it be available to buy? Where?
"Jungle" is available right now on Amazon! Go! Buy!
Actually, wait, you should probably grab "Colony" first. I won't stop you, but starting at the beginning is the ideal reading order. You can find all the rest of my works on Amazon as well, available in a nice convenient, DRM-free ebook format. They're affordable, they're titanic, and I've got everything from Fantasy-Western to a romance short in "A Dragon and Her Girl." "Fireteam Freelance" on the other hand is free and out now right on my website. Curious readers can go to maxonwriting.com, click the "Fireteam Freelance" tab and dig into episode after episode of mercenary Sci-Fi action! How can readers find you?
My website (maxonwriting.com) is the best hub for all things related to me and my books. News, previews, teasers, and other stuff go there. Other stuff also includes "Being a Better Writer," a weekly writing series each Monday I've been running for 4-5 years now on just about every topic imaginable. If you're a reader there's books and short stories to check out, if you're an aspiring writer and author there's hundreds of articles on all aspects of writing to help you along.
I'm also on Patreon and Twitter, the former being a nice way for fans to show support (with rewards for their efforts) and the latter mostly just as a feed for when new articles hit the site. Lastly, I can be found on Facebook as well, and have a hub-page there for the site that shares the same name (Unusual Things).
What inspires you to keep writing?
I've got two quotes that really impact the way I look at writing. The first is from CS Lewis, and has been a favorite of mine ever since I read it:
“Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
The second quote is from Sigeru Miyamoto, an icon of the gaming industry and an instrumental figure in many childhoods.
“What if everything you see is more than what you see--the person next to you is a warrior and the space that appears empty is a secret door to another world? What if something appears that shouldn't? You either dismiss it, or you accept that there is much more to the world than you think. Perhaps it is really a doorway, and if you choose to go inside, you'll find many unexpected things.”
I love both of these quotes because together, they're views on fiction and imagination. Lewis points out that we're never to old to learn something new or experience something fun, while Miyamoto's quote, at least to me, is all about exploring those fun, new things, and in the process learning and experiencing so much more than we ever thought possible.
Which, in a way, is what inspires me to keep writing. I love telling stories, stories about characters and places. Deeply. But I also love that every book I put out there becomes a door to another world for a reader. They pick it up, open the pages, and then they're somewhere else, experiencing new things. Characters become friends, peril becomes real, adventure becomes inspiration and experience. When I hear a reader talk about my books like they themselves went to Pisces, or rode horses through the Outlands with Sali and Meelo, it brings glee to my heart. I brought them an experience and an adventure they couldn't have had any other way. There's one more angle to it I'll mention, though. When I started writing, I made a promise that I'd give people characters and stories they could look up to. Characters that could inspire them. There's plenty of dark, brooding, depressing material out there in the world. We need more heroes. People that choose to do the right thing, even if they fail at it when they try, but get back up and try again. And it absolutely feels worth it when a reader comes up to me and tells me they're glad I wrote whichever story they read, because they felt like at the end they could become a better person and strive for more. Or they went out and did just that. Fantasy, Sci-Fi, whatever ... Books bring a world, but they can also change one for someone. And that makes all the pain, long hours, and effort worth every moment. Again and again. Anything you’d like to add?
It's been a long, winding, difficult trail getting this far ... But I wouldn't trade it for anything. To all my early fans, the ones who took a gamble on picking up a new book from an unknown author, to all the people that encouraged me to keep at it when the budget got tight, and to all the teachers I had in college who pushed me so hard to publish.
Thanks. That long trail? I wouldn't have made it this far any other way. Oh, and "Starforge" is coming people. Soon. Very soon! Thanks for the interview!
I met Max during a panel at LTUE 2020 on Non-biological characters and greatly enjoyed his enthusiasm. I wish him all the best with Jungle and all other future endeavors.
Sincerely,Nicholas P. AdamsJust a small-town boy with an overactive imagination.
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