STARKVILLE – John Mylroie, author and retired Mississippi State University professor of geology, said he’s finally begun to slow down – that is, after writing 22 books in the span of about three years.
“I’m in a situation where I feel like I’ve lost my virginity,” Mylroie said to the Friends of the Starkville Public Library during its Books and Authors program on Thursday afternoon. “I wrote these books in a fog of innocence. I wrote and wrote, made stories, got them together and it was great fun. Now I understand reality. I understand what needs to be done to my story, how I need to change how I write.”
Mylroie last spoke to the Friends of the Library in October 2023, when he had published just seven of his 22 books. Thursday, he reported he’s now published 18: a four-part science-fiction series, a two-part science fiction series, four independent fantasy novels, one apocalypse book and seven novels in the David Langwonaire thriller series.
The eighth installment of the David Langwonaire series “An Appropriate Assassination,” is set to be reviewed in September and on sale before Christmas. The book, written two summers ago, is about the assassination of a presidential candidate with a long gun, “something which very nearly happened to Trump” last year.
In 2023, Mylroie began work on his 23rd book, another installment of the David Langwonaire series. Since then, he’s written 13 chapters and is still far from done.
“Focus is hard to maintain when in the back of your mind, you’re commonly listening to what your editor is telling you,” Mylroie said. “It’s a parent-child relationship, and I am not the parent.”
But the trials of the publishing process aren’t bringing Myroie’s stories to a halt, he said. He’s still got more stories to tell and worlds to build.
Mylroie’s 23rd book doesn’t yet have a working title, but the story follows a murder aboard a cruise ship. The background is laid, Mylroie said, but now the hard part is figuring out how to make the cruise ship disappear.
“People ask me, ‘Where do your ideas come from? What’s going on inside your head,’” Mylroe said. “I once had the regional biologist for National Park Service look in my eyes and say, ‘It’s a howling wilderness in there,’ He was correct. He was highly accurate.”
With many of his characters stranded on planets, harnessing magic, racing across North Alabama or saving kidnapped government officials, Mylroie’s ideas don’t always come from personal experience, and he almost never knows what’s going to happen to his characters.
“I’m a (pantser),” Mylroie said. “I write from the seat of my pants. … I don’t know where the books go until I get there.”
Many of his characters, though, are based off of his own family members and friends.
David Langwonaire, for example, a retired professor of geology, shares a similar likeness to Mylroie’s own. His family mirrors the family in “Discriminator,” a book following an apocalyptic social collapse. Emily Carnnontin, a daughter of a British ambassador and protagonist of the David Langwonaire series, is modeled after one of Mylroie’s daughter-in-laws.
Some of Mylroie’s characters also draw inspiration from people he met while overseas during his multi-decade career as a geologist and cave explorer.
“I write for me, and because I’m writing for me, and I have to build a family, I want to populate it with my own kids because that’s sort of fun,” Mylroie said. “…I draw characters from my experience, and when I have to draw a character not from my experience, I have to … be careful not to fall into any stereotypes and make them believable.”
Mylroie assured the Friends of the Library that he wouldn’t be filing away his manuscripts or capping his pen anytime soon – the bottom line is, it’s too fun.
“It’s great fun to create whole new planets, whole new worlds, whole new people,” Mylroie said, following the meeting. “I think I have more stories. I have more things I want to talk about.”
“I want what I have written published,” he added. “… So I keep plugging along, and I will get the last few books out. When I have all 22 books published, I’ll sit back and see if I can finish that 23rd book.”
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