Award-winning AUthor: David Alan Armstrong

Born and raised in Long Beach, California, I received my B.A. in Elementary Education from Brigham Young University and a M.S. in Instructional Design from the University of Southern California. With short stints as a fifth-grade teacher and a printer behind me, I finally found my lifetime vocation as a computer programmer and project manager. After working fifteen years for various aerospace companies in Southern California, I moved my family to Utah in 1995 and worked for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the information technology department. Now retired, my wife Evelyn and I own plots in the Kaysville City cemetery, so Kaysville is home. We raised three children and enjoy five grandchildren. 

Settle in. The year was 1966. Seventh grade English class. My teacher was Mrs. Upham. The writing assignment was an essay about my favorite TV show. Batman, starring Adam West, had just debuted. I had high hopes for this action hero series, but I was totally disappointed. I didn't understand what the word "camp" meant, nor was I familiar with "farce." Batman turned out not to be my favorite show that fall, but I chose to write about it anyway, not because I loved it but because I hated it. The title of my essay was "Fatman and Bobbin the Boy Blunder."

Not only did Mrs. Upham give me an A, but at Back To School Night, she praised my literary skills to my parents and highly recommended that I pursue writing. Heady stuff for an impressionable teenager.

I did just that for the next six years, signing up for journalism classes, working on the junior high and high school newspaper staffs and ultimately becoming editor-in-chief of the high school paper and receiving an award for outstanding journalistic achievement from the Long Beach Press-Telegram. 

And that was it. I retired from creative writing at the ripe old age of 18. My goal was to become an elementary school teacher, so I put writing aside and majored in Elementary Education for my undergraduate degree. 

I never quite got the writing bug out of my system, however. During college I wrote several short stories and articles for magazines, all of which were summarily rejected. 

After graduation, I quickly learned during my first three months as a fifth-grade teacher in Long Beach, California, that being trapped in a crowded classroom with 37 rambunctious 11-year-olds was not the lifetime career for me. I went to night school to learn computer programming and found my vocational love. (My wife was also not disappointed to give up a teacher's salary for a corporate salary.)

Ten years later, I found myself on the leading edge of a new technology being introduced into corporate America: Executive Information Systems. Personal computers had begun to appear in corner offices and executive board rooms. My VP wanted an EIS for his office, and so I built one. When the project ended, the director of the I/T department asked me to write a report of what I had done. 

He was expecting two pages. What I gave him was fifty. He contacted the editor of Datamation Magazine, and in 1980, I pared down my fifty-page dissertation into two articles that Datamation published. 

The writing bug was resuscitated. I started writing short plays and readers' theater pieces. I found local small venues desperate for material to perform them. 

Encouraged, I took a correspondence course (many years before the advent of online internet education) to learn to write children's fiction. With my elementary education background, I figured I could relate to the audience. Besides, children's stories didn't have to be as complicated as stories for adults. After all, what do kids know about writing? At the end of the course, I managed to produce a story titled "Twinkle Toes vs. the Firehawks." I submitted it to a literary magazine, and it got published. Hurrah!

But then life got busy again. I moved my family from Southern California to a little town a few miles north of Salt Lake City, Utah, and I got a short contract to write software for the world headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The short contract turned into a long contract, and I found myself working extra hours and even extra jobs to feed hungry teenage kids who needed cars and insurance and hockey gear and so forth. I had no time for serious writing.

Fast-forward to 2015. I had long ago transitioned from a contractor to a full-time employee for the Church Headquarters I/T department. The kids were grown and out of the house and raising their own families. I had discretionary time, and retirement was gradually coming into view. What should I do to prepare for my golden years? Could I learn enough in the next ten years to transition from software engineer and project manager to legitimate author?

Only one way to find out, so I wrote a book. I knew nothing about writing a novel. My children's fiction course was hardly preparation for writing a full-length adult novel. But I wouldn't let ignorance stop me. I had read a bazillion novels. And what better way to learn than to jump into the deep end of the pool and start thrashing.

I wasn't too far into my inaugural venture when I realized I needed help. I found the League of Utah Writers, a statewide organization that supported would-be authors with newsletters, writers conferences, writing contests, and local chapters to provide education and camaraderie in the lonely vigil of writing.

I started to learn real skills, and I applied them as best I could to my fledgling novel. A year later, I finished the first draft of my book. I talked a neighbor with some professional editing background into reading it. He marked it up, and I fixed the typos. Anxious to publish, and not willing to wait a year or two for traditional publishers to get around to reviewing and rejecting my grand accomplishment, I paid an independent publishing company to publish it. 

That's when I learned that writing a book is the easy job. Selling it is the hard job. Undaunted by my continuing naivete, I set about marketing my book. I bought a booth at the county fair and stood in the hot August sun for three days trying to persuade fair-goers that my novel was more interesting than the tilt-a-whirl. I sold a dozen copies. Hurrah! I took my book to a local book fair and sold two more copies. I set up a website, started a blog, ran a giveaway campaign, and ran Facebook ads. I gave copies to all my friends and coworkers. After a year, I had given away about a hundred books and sold a couple dozen.

I was now thoroughly daunted. To make matters worse, I had planned this first novel as the beginning of a trilogy, and I hadn't even started on the second book yet. Marketing the first book was eating up all the time that I should have been writing the second book.  

I set the marketing efforts aside and began Book 2. In the meantime, I had learned much about the writing craft, enough to tell me my first book wasn't very well written from a technical perspective. I wrote about half of the second book and hired a developmental editor to review it and help me improve it. Her advice: start over.

I had neither the energy nor the inclination to rewrite. Instead, I started a new novel, a completely different kind of story. The original trilogy was a suspense thriller full of action with a cast of thousands. My new idea was much simpler: a clean romance with just a handful of characters and told from a single character's point of view. I immediately engaged the developmental editor in the writing process. With her expert guidance, I was able to fix problems quickly to avoid the full-on rewrite debacle. We worked together through the manuscript until I reached the end of the story I wanted to tell. The result was The Porch. Though it was little more than a novella, it told a sweet and tender story that my editor loved. Because there is no real market for novellas, I chose again to self-publish. This time, however, I learned how to use Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing system. I skipped the middleman and published the book directly on Amazon in both eBook and paperback formats. I ramped up an online marketing campaign, gave away a bunch of copies, and sold very few.

I submitted The Porch to the annual writing contest sponsored by the League of Utah Writers. The judges awarded my book the Silver Quill prize, runner-up for the best fiction book published in 2019.

In February, 2020, I decided to retire from my full-time employment, in part because I wanted to work at least part time from home and my employer would not allow it. A week later, the COVID-19 Pandemic caused the shutdown of practically the whole world, including my office. My manager was suddenly more than willing to let me work from home, along with the rest of the country's workforce. But my retirement was already in the works.

With time on my hands, I looked for other writing avenues. I fell into contract writing, sometimes called writing-for-hire. I ghost-wrote blogs for a number of corporate websites and a few private clients. It was fun for a couple of years, but writing for other people was keeping me from writing for myself. I terminated my contracts in 2023 so I could focus on books again.

And here we are. If you have read all the way to the end of this biographical sketch, email me the word "perseverance" and I will send you a short story from my unpublished anthology.

Best wishes and welcome to my journey!

David Alan Armstrong

My objective is more than to entertain. Everything I write is intended to uplift, ennoble, and inspire. There are enough degrading, depressing, and hateful messages in this world. My positive messages of hope and goodness and decency may be only tiny drops in the ocean, but I believe every drop counts.

I am first and foremost a Christian. I cannot divorce who I am from what I write. While I do not always write directly about Christian doctrines, the themes of Christ's teachings about loving God and loving our neighbor underlie every story and figure prominently in my non-fiction works. 

Faith in Jesus Christ comes in many flavors, and my particular flavor is centered in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I am learning to be a disciple of Christ because of my conversion in this church. After I was baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ as a teenager, I served full-time as a missionary for two years in Germany and have held numerous lay ministry and teaching positions in my local congregations. My ministry currently includes coordinating and leading a caregiver support group for local people who are caring at home for aging parents and disabled spouses and children. 

I have made the study of the word of God a lifelong pursuit. I am not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ. But I also let others believe and worship as they choose and believe that God loves every one of His children regardless of race, nationality, creed, or religion.

Fiction

I want my novels and stories to touch hearts as well as minds. I want readers to feel as well as think. Fiction is a powerful medium to deliver messages because stories stir us. The best messages seep in between the lines, behind the laughter or the tears. The messages I try to weave into my stories are of hope, compassion, service, and love. Of course, there must be opposition in all things. The driver behind any story is conflict, and the strongest conflicts are between good and evil, right and wrong, love and hate. Therefore, many of my stories portray wickedness and righteousness. Evil, however, is never the hero. Wickedness never brings true happiness, at least not in the worlds I create.

At the same time, fiction is meant to be fun. Whether I am reading about the hero saving the day or the nerd getting his heart crush, I have fun living someone else's life. I enjoy seeing the world through others' eyes. Even the characters' painful moments can be cathartic and bring understanding to my own life in a new way. And when the story ends, maybe I'm a little wiser, but I have enjoyed the journey.

That is what I want for the readers of my fiction. Whether the ending is happy or sad or makes you smile or makes you mad, I hope you say, "What a trip!"

Non-Fiction  

I want my non-fiction books, on the other hand, to teach, or at least to make you think. I'm still reaching for the heart, but I'm also appealing to the intellect. My goal in non-fiction is not to coerce you or to convince you to think the way I think. I simply want you to think in your own way, and maybe think a new thought. I'm not so much determined to fill you with my knowledge as I am to motivate you to seek your own knowledge.

While I was never able to completely squelch the writer in me, I likewise cannot stifle the teacher that resides in my soul. When I learn something, I want to share it. I share through books and blogs. Just as I have fun writing fiction, I also have fun writing non-fiction. And more than just fun, teaching is my passion. When I cannot be in a classroom, writing is my pedagogical outlet.

My non-fiction topics are always motivated by my faith, and my writing always springs from God's word. The holy scriptures move me, lift me, inspire me, and teach me. What's more, God's written word is the doorway to His living word, communicated through the Holy Spirit to mind and heart. The scriptures are not for private interpretation, but they can be the source of deep pondering and profound meditation, from which can come powerful understandings and applications. My goal is not to interpret scripture but to apply it and make it live in my own life. And what lives in me, I want to share with others. Again, not that I have a corner of the market on truth, but by sharing what I believe, I hope to spur others to figure out what they believe and to live it. By giving you a peek into my world, I hope you see your own world more clearly.

I write for myself primarily. I love the creative processes of designing a story, outlining, and then stringing words together to make scenes come alive. I often surprise myself with what happens when a story begins to unfold and a character starts to breathe on his or her own. 

I love words. I love the musicality of words fashioned with a rhythm that adds to the meaning of the sentence. In elementary school I liked to use big, powerful words, like cacophony, indubitably, and disquietude. I also loved long words like antidisestablishmentarianism. Words speak to me in many ways, and I love to use them.

Ultimately, I write for fun. Building worlds and birthing characters is joyful work. Finishing a project, especially a long one like writing a book, is deeply satisfying. Seeing my product in print and holding a book of my words in my hand brings me jubilation. I love to make stuff, and since I'm not handy with a drawing pencil, a paint brush, or a band saw, words are my tools for making something beautiful.

For me, a big part of the fun of writing is when others read. I'm not a narcissist. I don't want to be praised and flattered, especially in public. I simply enjoy knowing that people read and appreciate what I have created. Any compliments belong to my books, not to me. My books receive awards, not me personally. I don't want people to love me, but I hope they fall in love with my characters.

Through the written word, I want to inspire people, to encourage them to see the best in themselves. I hope readers build a strong connection to my characters and my ideas. I want them to think of the heroes as their friends. I also try to draw out forgotten emotions in the reader. Perhaps it has been a long time since he has been swept up in the excitement of a teenage crush or she has felt the stabbing heartbreak of being dumped. Whether the emotions are good or bad, awakening buried feelings can bring fresh perspective to the current day. The good news is that the reader can close the book and put those feelings away.

I want to you to have as much fun reading as I have writing.