Today I am thrilled to welcome fellow Morgan James Publishing author Greg Scott!

Greg writes:

Here’s a little bit about me.

By the time I received my high school diploma, I had attended twelve separate schools. Thirteen, counting kindergarten. It didn’t take me long to figure out my circumstances growing up were different than pretty much everyone, and so I worked to keep as much in my head as I could. I figured, sooner or later, all those experiences would come in handy.

In 2013, I decided to write it all down. My wife told me nobody would care but me, but I wrote it all down anyway. She was right – I wrote 35,000 words of growing up stories that read like long business memos.

I found a hybrid publisher here in the Twin Cities and sat in on a meeting for aspiring authors in September, 2013. When it was my turn to share, the presenter asked me what genre I wrote. I didn’t know what a genre was.

I shared my not-yet-completed masterpiece and a few days later, they emailed me a reading list of books about stories and invited me to come back later with something better. I read all of them cover to cover. Stephen King and Robert McKee and others taught me about inciting incidents, emotional turns, editing, all writing is rewriting, and a whole bunch of other ingredients that go into great stories. Who knew there was a whole discipline to this stuff?

I put the memoir on the shelf and started another project I’d been thinking about for a long time. I’m a cybersecurity professional and I’ve read lots of how-to books. They all put me to sleep, except for the few paragraphs where authors shared war stories. I figured I could write a better cybersecurity book by illustrating the howto material with a story, and then maybe the public would sit up and listen to the threat we’re all up against.

And that’s how “Bullseye Breach: Anatomy of an Electronic Break-In” came to life. It debuted in April, 2015. It’s a story about how Minneapolis area retailer, Bullseye Stores, lost forty million customer credit card numbers to Russian mobsters, and what Jerry Barkley and an ad-hoc group in Minneapolis did about it. Real-world data breach victims should take a lesson from fiction.

I started “Virus Bomb” after publishing “Bullseye Breach,” and decided to try a different publishing path. “Virus Bomb” is a more aggressive story about what might happen if an overseas attacker gets serious about attacking the US over the internet. “Virus Bomb” doesn’t have as many cybersecurity details, but it does have deeper characters and higher stakes than “Bullseye Breach.” I also invested in the Jerry Jenkins Author’s Guild and “Your Novel Blueprint” course offering. I learned even more about the writing craft and did my best to incorporate it all into the new novel. Morgan James and I found each other in early 2018.

“Virus Bomb” ebooks are available now from Amazon. Paperbacks debut everywhere May 14, 2018.

I put lots of information about both books, including a growing catalog of character backstories and deleted scenes on my author website, at http://dgregscott.com/books/.

Jerry Barkley, my main character, is a middle aged, bald guy from Minnesota. He taught me that real superheroes are ordinary people who step up when called. Even when they don’t want to. I like his attitude. And for anyone interested in a few real-world memoir short stories, just hover over the About menu on my website at http://dgregscott.com.  These are way better than the versions I first did back in 2013. One of these days, I’ll be ready to finish that memoir.

In the meantime, I hope people enjoy “Virus Bomb” and “Bullseye Breach,” and learn about safety in the internet era. Cyberattacks really do effect real people, and when leaders like Warren Buffet say cybersecurity is the number one problem facing humanity, the world should listen.

I hope you will check out Greg’s books!