Self Aggrandizement

My name is Preston Edwards. I generally hate talking about myself, but people tell me it’s important. So, here I am. What most people want to know is why I started writing, and what drove me to get into the publishing space.

I started writing by accident. My uncle, John Thurston Edwards, spent his life in Hollywood circles. He was not a big shot or anything, just a humble set decorator and designer. Throughout his career, he wanted to be a screen writer. One day when I was eleven years old, I was at his house in Wilmington, NC. He was working on One Tree Hill at the time. I discovered a screenplay he had written called “Stone Soup". The screenplay was a depiction of life and the disappointments that happen between people when relationships don’t work out. It was a beautiful story. After speaking with him about it, and what I felt while reading, he encouraged me to start writing. Thus, I became an author.

I finished my first novel at fourteen, but it has never (and will never) seen the light of day. It is the inane nonsense one could expect of an angry teenager with a limited grasp of the English language. From there, I wrote two other novels and a collection of short stories based around my time in the military. None of these were worthy of publication themselves, but they gave me enough of an insight into how a book could be written and the nuances of making a good story. I took a lot of faith and advice from Brandon Sanderson who has often told of writing around eight full books before he found one he liked.

As the Pendulum Swings started as a single image in my head. The iconic image that now graces the front of the book. I began to weave a story and a world around that image that could create a feeling of immense patriotism and dissent simultaneously. I never intended to publish the book, I just liked to write. I did share it with my aunt and one friend of a friend of a friend just to gauge how people liked it. Forty-two people later, and the immensely profuse review to the right of this blurb, and I was convinced I had written something that was worth the ink. So, I hope you enjoy the little slice of my insanity that I have committed to words.