The Official Website of Steven Maus

Once upon a time I was riding in the family van, a white and teal chevy with two bucket seats in the middle and a bench seat in back. I was sitting in the bucket seat behind the driver's seat, and I was scrawling on paper, a line or two here and there, because if I focus on words for too long while in a moving vehicle, that good ole nerdy affliction acts up; carsickness. I was working on the control scheme for a video game that I was thinking up, and along with the names of characters and places, I had to think up a story. Suffice it to say that in that chevy van, Branchwater was born. Six years ago, as the necessary plot to a game focusing on medival-action (a game that never saw it past a few failed attempts on RPG Maker 2), my baby has its origins.

A year or two later, I had a dream, and to this day it is the only dream that I have put down on paper. As a rule, I hate dreams, and I ignore them as much as I can. But this one was different. I detailed this one in a five-page short story that I still plan to use in a future novel. Three years after I was flirting with carsickness in the bucket seat of a chevy van, I was living with some co-workers and reading the first draft of one of my sister's novels. It was while reading pouring over this manuscript that I realized "I can do this."

Now, my second book is only a few months away from publication, I'm well-underway with my third, which is a continuation of the Branchwater story, and I'm as poor as I've ever been. Not only that, but I've acquired a need to travel and see new places. But I do have one advantage, and that is time, and I'll be damned if I'm going to waste it staying in one place, doing the same thing for the rest of my life. Now if only I could figure out an affordable, interesting way to change things up...