Meet Steven Anderson

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Steven Anderson. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Steven below.

Steven, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?

My wife began to have trouble walking in 2003. The woman who had matched my steps for fifteen years and climbed Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks with our son’s boy scout troop, had what the doctors at John Hopkins diagnosed as primary lateral sclerosis. PLS is a degenerative neurologic condition, meaning the day she was diagnosed would be her best day, and the doctors told us to expect the weakness in her legs to be just a little worse every morning that followed. Her arms would weaken too, and the muscles that let her breathe and swallow.
The changes are imperceptible day by day. Unlike ALS, PLS takes its time in stealing a life, granting ample room to mourn. I’ve mourned over twenty years for the life that has been taken from her. Our children and grandchildren will never know the woman who played the extrovert to my inclination for a quiet life. She is good for me, and I’ve always known it.
My friends and coworkers watched what I would do when I told them that my wife would lose her life a piece at a time. A couple of them voiced what all of them were thinking behind the kind and genuine words of support. They expected I’d divorce her. That’s not who I am. I love my wife, more now than when we first were married. And I’m resilient.
I credit my father for the gift of resilience. Part of the Greatest Generation, the product of an uneven childhood in 1930s Nebraska who entered the Marine Corps during WW2 as a seventeen-year-old, he became an aerospace engineer after the war thanks to the GI Bill and his unrelenting optimism. He was my dad, my role model, who never let the troubles of life penetrate into the soul of who he knew himself to be. It’s a simple, maybe simplistic, formula. Know who you are. Don’t let the circumstances you find yourself in change who you are. It still took me decades to realize what he was doing, and I still work every day to live up to his example. His, and my, resilience comes from a stoic, almost fatalistic, optimism. I know exactly where my dad got it from. The family friend who helped raise him had a standard answer when anyone asked how he was doing. He’d smile and say, “Every day is Christmas.” By which he meant every sunrise welcomed another day full of hope and new beginnings. It helps me choose to do what I know to be right, whether it’s returning the shopping cart to the parking lot corral, or choosing to not only stick with a loved one through hard times, but to find the joy in being there. I’ve had troubles in my life including being diagnosed, treated and (I hope) cured of cancer in the past year, but what troubles? Every day between now and when the Lord calls me home is Christmas.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I grew up in Boulder, Colorado at the height of its Earth-Mother Chic period of the 1970s and 80s. It being home, I thought it was normal. It definitely still colors my world view for better or worse. I graduated from the University of Colorado with degrees in economics and geology. It seemed an odd double major, and I often explained it away by claiming an interest in extractive industries, i.e. mining and drilling. In truth, I liked the combination because economics is a lens for viewing all human history and geology covers most everything else. It didn’t matter. I graduated in a time of recession, geologists were a dime a dozen, and economists? Prospects were dismal.
Instead of using my formal education, I became an IT guy and systems engineer, first in the financial sector and then for a defense contractor for twenty years. Knowledge of what it takes to design, build, and maintain satellite command and control systems provides much of the technical background in my science fiction books, but it’s the personalities of my friends and coworkers that drive the stories. Deeply flawed characters who have to depend on each other to survive and accomplish their goals are more interesting than pure technology.
My wife has a degenerative neurologic condition. When it reached the point where she required someone to be with her 24×7, I had a choice of taking retirement to be with her or hiring someone to do it for me. Since I kind of like my wife, and the finances looked doable, I gave up my 60-hour-a-week job to be with her. The silver lining is that it gave me time to write full time. No one warned me that writing is easily a 60-hour-a-week job.
I’ve now published five novels and a handful of short stories, with novel number six nearly completed and set to be published late 2024. The creative journey has been fun, frustrating, exhausting, and invigorating. The friends I’ve made along the way are the best part. I could not have done it without them.
My work can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/Steven-J.-Anderson/author/B075KJCDGY.
My website is https://www.stevenandersonbooks.com/

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Feed your creativity by being in community. Don’t worry about imposter syndrome; we all have it. Take risks. Win or lose, you’ll learn something valuable. I usually learn more from losing.

If you write, you’re a writer. It’s the necessary and sufficient activity that defines us. We write. To take the next step, we have to finish what we write, and then publish through traditional publishers or independently. We do all this in the hope that people we will never meet read our work and share a piece of who we are.
Other writers do it, so why not you? For me, this is where intentional ignorance plays its part. If I’d known all the things I’d need to learn to complete the seemingly simple steps of write, finish, publish, sell, I might not have started writing at all. It’s work, often hard, frustrating work, that takes long hours. And there’s still much I need to learn. Marketing and promotion mystify me, so, I still feel like an imposter. I’m OK with that. It keeps me humble and honest and willing to ask for help or provide help to other writers. All of us imposters are on a journey together, so we help each other and we’re never lonely.

What’s been one of your main areas of growth this year?

I’ve been thinking a lot about risk in the last year, both personal and professional. Overcoming a natural desire to play it safe is critical for succeeding in any creative endeavor. Advice my brother gave me fifty years ago helped.
When first learning to drive, I entered a long sweeping curve a bit over speed. I didn’t panic, but I thought pretty hard about it. My older brother, riding shotgun, calmly told me, “Focus on the end of the curve. That’s where you want to go. Don’t look at the road directly in front of us at all.” Damn if he wasn’t right.
I want people to read my books. Making money would be nice, but it’s a consequence of writing a good book, not what’s in my mind while I’m writing. Tossing a book out onto Amazon with the 4 million new titles published each year won’t cut it.
I’m an introvert, like most writers, so going to a Comic Con or other event and standing by a table to pitch people to part with their money in exchange for my beloved books, my children, is not easy. But it’s gotten easier. I learn a little from each event. I talk to other vendors about what works for them. I attend sessions on selling at conferences hosted by our local writers group. Mostly I’ve learned to relax, have fun, and keep my eyes on where I want to go and not fuss about the little things like people who walk past my table without slowing. I’ve come to like talking to strangers.
Understanding body language and the look in their eyes while I’m telling them about my books and my journey as an author lets me tailor what I say. What terrified me most became my favorite part of selling books. The feeling of risk went down as my knowledge and experience increased, which makes me want to push a little harder the next time through the curve. It’s also made me more confident and more tolerant of risk in my writing.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.stevenandersonbooks.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheropodPublishing
• Twitter: https://x.com/RuComm352
• Other: Amazon Author page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Steven-J.-Anderson/author/B075KJCDGY