Biography

Meus Vita

Jeffrey S Savage was born in the cabin of a whaling ship off the port of Zanzibar. The third of two children, he enjoys chicken taming, water ballet, and alphabet soup. His favorite color is—

Would you keep reading something like that? Me neither.

If you really care about where I was born, what my dog's name was, or how I choose a good watermelon, feel free to e-mail me. Otherwise let's just cut to the juicy stuff.

As far back as I can remember, I've loved stories. Reading them, hearing them, telling them, and occasionally even writing them. And yet, I can't ever recall actively considering getting a book published—much less more than one—until I did.

My cousins remind me that when I was about fourteen and they ranged in ages from five to twelve, we used to go fishing. We'd all throw our lines into the water and sit around on the bank while I told them stories. Most of them revolved around the heroic Captain Weenie and his arch nemesis The Little Purple Man. They must have been good, because, six to eight kids would sit for hours, only stopping when a fish bit. I wish I remembered those stories now, so I could publish them and make a bundle.

Anyway, my point is that I was fascinated by great stories. Genre didn't matter-mystery, adventure, Sci-Fi, fantasy, horror, thriller—I loved 'em all. I'm the only kid I know who used to cut classes to go to the school library and read. But I never once thought, Hey, I want to grow up to be a writer. I think it seemed about as farfetched to me as growing up to be an astronaut. Now, becoming a race car driver, that was perfectly logical.

In high-school, a group of my friends and I published an underground newspaper. Then, in the early nineties, my wife and I briefly published a computer newspaper—originally enough called The Utah Computer News. But the closest I ever came to having someone else publish anything I wrote was when I was in high school and queried a Dungeons and Dragons mag about my Golden Banana story (link to Golden Banana story in FAQ) (I never wrote it even though they were interested.) and the time my college literary magazine was going to publish my short story (I met my wife and forgot all about literary magazines.)

Fast forward to 2001. I'm working for a company that makes little creatures that move around your computer screen and talk to you. The high-tech world is extremely stressful and it seems like I'm always on a plane. One day, as I'm walking out of the office, I notice that the security door opens from the inside even after the door is locked from the outside. So if you wanted to break into the building you could just hide a remote control car and . . .

Bam! Suddenly I have this story in my head. A high-tech thriller where a computer programmer breaks into a building and installs intelligent agents on all of the computers. So I wrote the story, and people seemed to like it. After I finished it, I was like, So what do I do with it now?

I did the usual-buy a copy of Writer's Market, send out queries, get rejections-and would probably have left it on a shelf somewhere. Except that somewhere along the way, someone suggested that I send it to Covenant.

Who?

Covenant. The LDS publisher.

But it's not a church book. It's fiction. It's a high-tech thriller. People get killed!

Covenant publishes thrillers.

Ok.

And the rest is history.