My writing inspiration started with Neil Armstrong's first footsteps on the Moon. I was serving in the U.S. Air Force in 1969 when Apollo 11 touched down, and I remember thinking that we had finally made it. I'd been reading science fiction since grade school, and now all those wonderful stories of space travel --as told by Heinlein, Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke -- were about to come true. We'd soon be on Mars and have manned missions going to the asteroid belt and the outer planets. Star travel? Well, why not -- we'd already met and conquered so many scientific and engineering challenges we'd probably figure out how to get around Einstein as well.

Of course, that didn't happen. 1972 saw the last landing on the Moon, and when another decade saw no attempt to return I felt like a dream had been lost. That's when I started writing, and the Lunar Free State series is the result -- stories about people who didn't lose the dream.

There's no limit to what we can achieve if we put our minds to it, and so far there's no limit to the stories I want to write. The original series is now five novels published to date and another one scheduled for publication in March of 2022. Meanwhile, I've been doing something I never thought I'd do -- writing stories in someone else's "universe." I've got two novels in the raw and gritty urban fantasy series known as Hit World, created by William Alan Webb and Larry Hoy. That series begins with Webb's The Trashman and my two are titled The Ferryman and The Dragons of Styx. I've promised Bill Webb another one in that series for 2022.

... and then, I've got two short stories in the anthologies Standing Fast and Standing and Standing Defiant, stories in Webb's Last Brigade series. For those who like post-apocalyptic SF, these are two great collections of stories by a bunch of great writers.

Check them out. I hope you enjoy reading as much as I enjoyed writing them.

John E. Siers, Author, Oakland, Tennessee