Hi there, Reader! I’m Jason.
Some of you might know me by a different nickname, and trust me, there have been many over the years. I won’t flinch if you call me Wilson. If you’ve clicked a link to this page, that means you are living in the future! Well, at least in reference to when I first started this website, more than twenty years ago (established, 2002).
I tend to ramble on in posts, believe it or not, and you, Dear Reader, probably only really want to see a brief bio real quick so you can confidently buy one of my books for yourself or the local Little Free Library, without having to fear that I’m some loony tune whose children’s books are thinly veiled political indoctrination or a morose cautionary tale on the horrors of picking one’s nose.
Whether that’s the case or not is up for interpretation. But, if TL;DR is your thing, here’s the short version of “Who Am I”?
About the Author
Jason A. Rust was born in Indianapolis but grew up and made his life in northern Kentucky, just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. Jason has a wonderful and very tolerant wife, four very individual kids he couldn’t be prouder of, two very lazy dogs he couldn’t be more envious of, and an active imagination that frequently wanders back to the stories of adventure and mystery he’d curl up with when he was just a kid. An avid reader, movie fan, and lifelong lover of fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and horror, Jason writes middle grade stories that hopefully would have had his younger self putting off brushing his teeth.
Now, if you’re interested in why I write/what I write/how we got here, well, that’s very much not going to be a TL;DR situation. But, if you’re really curious, settle in. Maybe get yourself a crunchy snack and a beverage.
Okay, so, see, I’m the kind of guy who has always loved stories and storytelling. I started reading at a young age (omg, such a cliche!) and spent most of my youth in the mad hunt for Pizza Hut personal pan pizzas (ask your parents and/or grandparents). I was also the “gifted” kid at every school I ever attended (omg! More! Cliche!), which back in the day was a virtual guarantee that many of your friends were going were be found in books.
It was also a virtual guarantee that you were going to be woefully unprepared for the utter disappointment of adulthood when you were constantly led to believe unequivocally in your specialness and limitless potential, but that’s a whole different rant.
Anyway, so I ended up with a love for fiction. Would could have seen that coming?
As it turned out, I wasn’t too bad at writing either, and so young/new adult me always wondered if maybe I couldn’t make a living at it one day. I even started college as a literature major. But then I found out what someone with a Bachelor’s in Literature can do with their life, and, more importantly, what those opportunities pay on average.
Reader, believe me when I say that by the time I was 19 years old, I was tired of being a poor student already. The last thing I wanted was to be a poor professional adult.
So! One extremely unlikely pivot (that I like to believe is still talked about in the hallways of Northern Kentucky University) and three and a half years later, and I had myself a Bachelor’s in Computer Science and Mathematics.
Writing software is surprisingly almost as fulfilling a creative endeavor as writing stories is, or, well, it used to be. I’ll spare you my rant on the current state of software engineering, but what I will say is that the kids don’t software anymore, they have programs that the OGs wrote for them to write the software now instead. That’s a simplification, of course, but even the way I wrote software apps ten years ago no longer really exists.
Alas, I digress.
In 2002, I had a brief bout with unemployment, as anyone working in technology was likely to have at some point in the early 21st Century, coinciding with brand-spanking new fatherhood. We had our first son within seven days of me being laid off from the job I’d held for the preceding five years. As an added bonus–and probably a reflection of the stress level of his very uncertain new parents–the kid was colicky, and wouldn’t sleep at night. Always having been a night owlish person myself, I stayed up with him, but I didn’t know what to do with myself. Therefore I did want any reasonably foolish person would do, I started a blog.
The blog, which went by the name Puddintopia (don’t ask, there is too much) has survived in various formats and with various theme and goals since the day I started it, despite the fact that my unemployment was a blessed brief three months. If you click “The Archive” link above, you’ll find every post I’ve ever written. Yes, going all the back to 2002. They say the internet never forgets, and I resemble that remark.
In January of 2010, I decided that while I hadn’t quite given up on the dream of writing stories, as a writer, I was a pretty shitty one as far as output went. I was getting old, and it was time to shit or get off the pot. So I dusted off my slumbering blog, challenging myself to write 300 posts of 400 words or more over the course of 2010. I called it the 120,000 of words about nothing challenge, and I completed it by October 2nd of that year.
That’s not even the craziest thing I’ve ever committed a year to, either. Wait until you find out what I did in 2018.
During the course of my 120,000 Words about Nothing, I would occasionally write short bits of fiction for a particular day’s post. Little did I know that I’d end up combining a couple of those bits together as the start of a novel. Eighteen laborious months later, I had a completed draft of my first book, Famine. What’s that? Oh, why, yes, it is available, thank you asking. I published it in early 2020 under the pen name J. R. Andrews. Now, I’m not usually the kind of guy to be shilling his wares every times he opens his mouth (yes, yes, I am), but I’m not afraid to say that no personal library is complete without a copy. Get yours today!
Anyway, in the “taking stock” phase after drafting Famine, I was a little dismayed by how loooooooong it took. I wanted to see if I could do it faster. Mind you, this was back in 2011, when things didn’t always suck and there was occasionally some positivity in the world. Sure, everything was still probably monochrome, but cars didn’t have more confusing prone-to-breaking electrical systems than your grandma’s VCR quite yet, Twitter was still a fun place to hang out and share information rather than where you go to get fed the latest bullshit by Russian-sponsored bots while snarling at people you don’t know, Facebook wasn’t a cesspool controlling your feed with “artificial intelligence” that chooses which lies to show you first, NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, was still a live, vibrant thing, and I’m pretty sure people still said “gosh darn it.”
I decided to try NaNo that month, and just days before I began, one of my still under-the-age-of-ten children asked me at bedtime if I’d ever thought about writing a book for them. Well, Famine was a horror novel about vampires surviving after a pandemic ends humanity, so it was safe to assume I had not. But I thought about that at the start of the project and ultimately figured that since NaNo’s stated goal was to write a 50k-word draft in 30 days, a middle grade novel made a lot of sense. Adult novels are usually 75-100k depending on genre, so a 50k-word adult “manuscript” wasn’t really a complete novel anyway. A good start, sure, but not a novel.
I wanted to write an actual complete novel that month, and by The Eight Gods of the Golden Acres Retirement Community and Assisted Living Center’s Bedpans, that’s what I did. The draft I wrote that month eventually became Longshots, and it got me signed with a literary agent. Now, we’re not going to talk about how that went, but suffice it to say that all agent experiences are different, and at the end of the day, as me and the 20 or more other authors and illustrators represented by that agent all ended up unceremoniously unagented on a brutal day in July, 2018, mine wasn’t great.
Nevertheless, Longshots was born thanks to NaNoWriMo, as was my love for writing middle grade fiction. And that’s how we ended up here, finally getting my MG novels publishing, for you and all your kids to enjoy.
I hope you’ll give one–or even all!–of them try, and don’t be afraid to contact me with questions, concerns, or you grandmother’s peach cobbler recipe.
But also, no, I won’t trade you my mom’s oatmeal cake recipe for it either. Sorry.
A fella’s got to have something to stand on.
Jason A. Rust: Author 