Scott Oden was born in Columbus, Indiana, in 1967.  The youngest of five, he was raised in rural North Alabama, near Huntsville, where he still resides.  Scott's fascination with Egypt and the ancient world began in 1976, when his third-grade teacher showed the class slides from the traveling Tutankhamun exhibit.  He studied history and English at Calhoun College and the University of Alabama before pursuing the usual variety of odd jobs—from delivering pizza to working in the bindery of a printing company to clerking at a video store.  Men of Bronze is his first novel.

That’s me in less than a hundred words.  It’s pretty concise, and it covers all the basics.  But, it doesn’t say anything, does it?  Since you’ve been kind enough to visit my website, and hopefully to read one of my books, I feel I should tell you something more . . .

Did you know that, if you write a book set in the ancient world, people for whatever reason assume you’re some kind of genius?  The most common refrain I hear is this: “All that research!  I don’t know how you do it!”  That skews the meaning of ‘genius’, if you ask me.  An interest in Antiquity is no different from any other hobby or passion.  The ability to breakdown and rebuild a carburetor appears as arcane to my eyes as a passion for recalling what happened in Egypt in 525 BCE might seem to others.  We could argue which is the more useful skill . . .

I’m often asked why I write.  The answer is simple, really.  I write because I love to read.  Nothing surpasses that feeling you get when you go into a bookstore and find that perfect piece of literature.  Not technically perfect, mind you.  But that one book that speaks to you, that tugs at your soul and draws you in with promises of warmth, love, adventure, whatever your heart’s desire.  Then, as you come to the end, you realize the author has kept those promises he made you.  It’s that connection I strive for in my own books.

Writing is all I’ve done since December 2000: no day job, no safety net, and never more than a step away from ruin.  It’s a constant fight against poverty and apathy, and any success I’ve had I attribute to stubbornness inherited from my parents.  But, for all its hardships, I cannot imagine doing anything else.  To take the English language as a palette and the mind as a canvas, to produce something memorable, something dramatic, has a narcotic effect.  It’s addictive.  On the good days, you feel the joy God must have felt to see his creation come alive.  On the bad days, you become as an angel cast out of heaven.  You writhe, you moan, you pine for the day when the words flow again.  But you keep going, day in and day out, stringing letters into words, words into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs.  Pages—and often rejection slips—accumulate like snowflakes on a blade of grass.  Still, you keep going.  Perseverance, you see, is what separates writers from those who want to write.

Me, I won’t quit till they pry the keyboard from my cold, dead fingers.

A Brief Q&A:

Q: When did you decide to become a writer?

I began writing with an eye toward making it my career at the age of 14.  I wanted to write fantasy—to this day, my inspirations and chief influences remain Robert E. Howard and J.R.R. Tolkien—but my attempts came across as ham-handed, retreads of Conan or The Lord of the Rings.  I tried other genres, too.  Discovering William Gibson sent me off on a cyberpunk bender even as H.P. Lovecraft seduced me into trying my hand at mind-shattering and all-consuming horror.  All to no avail.  I could not find my ‘voice’ and thus remained frustrated and unpublished.

Life went on.  As I waited for the ‘not quite right for us’ rejections to turn to gleeful acceptances, I grew up, married too young, and embarked on an impressive string of failed jobs all while trying to eke out an hour here and there to write.  Co-workers and employers would ask me what I planned to do with my life, and I’d reply (steely-eyed, I hoped) that I was a writer.  Invariably, their interest would wane once they discovered I hadn’t actually sold anything.  Encouragement, in those years, was hard to come by.

In the 1990’s, an odd synchronicity occurred.  A friend and former co-worker, James Byron Huggins, who’d been writing for years in the Christian market, broke out and sold his fourth book to Bob Mecoy* at Simon and Schuster, with movie rights going to Bruce Willis.  It was huge; I worked at a video store at the time and Byron would come in occasionally.  We’d chat, and I finally worked up the nerve to ask him if he’d like to read something I wrote.  Graciously, he said yes.

The 90’s were my pastiche Conan years.  A ‘pastiche Conan’ is a book featuring Conan of Cimmeria, the redoubtable barbarian created by Robert E. Howard; indeed, Robert Jordan first made his mark by writing some very good pastiche Conan stories for Tor Books.  I hoped to emulate.  Thus, I gave Byron the first couple of chapters (okay, the only couple of chapters, endlessly rewritten) of my Conan opus.  He read them, came back to the video store, and said: “You’re a good writer.  Leave the short stories alone and write books—that’s where the money is.  And, it’s going to be easier if you create your own characters.”

To this day, that stands as some of the best career advice I’ve ever received.  Regardless, it took several years to actually implement Byron’s counsel (which reminds me of a quote from the movie The Matrix: “There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.”).  The secret to Really Good Fantasy still eluded me, though I did finally narrow it down to my own inability at the time to create a world with gravitas.  This bothered me to no end.  In fact, it was during one of these moments of creative melancholy that I switched on the TV and caught the beginning of an old epic, The Egyptian (from Mika Waltari’s book of the same name).  I watched it straight through, fascinated.  There was the depth I was looking for!  There was the gravitas, the burgeoning sense of antiquity that defines Middle-earth and the Hyborian Age of REH!  And it had been right under my nose all along.  The movie renewed my childhood interest in ancient Egypt and Greece, and within months I began laying the foundations for what would become my first novel, Men of Bronze.

Q: Your bio says you’re a role-playing gamer.  Which ones do you play?

I started out years ago with the original Dungeons and Dragons (the blue book), then progressed to AD&D, Traveller, and Call of Cthulhu.  Actually, very few people know that my first publishing credit, fresh out of high school, was an abysmal role-playing game called Rogue Warrior.  Its only saving grace was illustrations done by my friend and classmate, Cully Hamner—now a damn fine comic book artist.  Nowadays, my gaming group primarily uses the Iron Kingdoms rules from Privateer Press, while I’m partial to either Conan or OGL Ancients, both from Mongoose Publishing.

Q: What video games do you play?

I’m an Xbox 360 junkie.  I love first-person shooters, especially Halo/Halo 2 and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas; I’m also a huge fan of Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.  I play an Orc.

Q: Yeah, what is it with you and Orcs?

Tolkien introduced me to Orcs while I was still in grade school—and they made quite an impression.  Some kids want to grow up to be a fireman or a policeman.  I wanted to grow up and be an Orc.  I’d read and re-read my favorite chapters of Tolkien’s trilogy: those on Moria in The Fellowship of the Ring, ‘The Uruk-Hai’ in The Two Towers, and ‘The Tower of Cirith Ungol’ in The Return of the King.  Then, I’d go outside and ‘play Orc’.  Today, technology allows me to pursue my Orcish interests.  I play Orc characters in Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, and also the couple of times I’ve played World of Warcraft (though personally, I find the piggish depictions of them totally absurd). One of my goals as a writer has been to reinvent the Orcs as a viable race, with a viable culture, that could exist in our own world.  Hopefully, I’ll have the opportunity to do just that in an upcoming book.

*Let’s talk about synchronicity.  As of this writing (January 2007), Bob Mecoy, formerly my friend Byron’s editor at Simon and Schuster and who now runs Creative Book Services, is my literary agent.  Small world . . .