John Gilstrap:
CLASS OF 1975
James Robinson Secondary SchoolClass of 1975
Fairfax, VA
John's Story
I graduated from the College of William and Mary in 1979, and armed with a degree in American history, I couldnât find a job. I ended up settling for a position with a little-noticed trade journal serving the construction industry. They called me the managing editor and they paid me food stamp wages. I hated it. About this time, I joined the Burke Volunteer Fire Department in Fairfax County, Virginia, if only to find relief from the boredom of my job. Running about a thousand calls my first year with the department, I was hooked, and the volunteer fire service became an important part of my life for the next 15 years. In the early eighties, hating my job, I went the way of all frustrated liberal arts undergradsâback to graduate school. Earning a Master of Science degree in safety engineering from the University of Southern California, I started down a whole new road. For the next decade and a half, I became an expert (donât you hate that word?) on explosives safety and hazardous waste. Meanwhile, I kept writing. I didnât tell anyone, of course, because, well, you just donât share artistic dreams with fellow engineers. They look at you funny.
My first novel, Nathanâs Run, was in fact my fourth novel, and when it sold, it sold big. At a time in my life when things were going wellâI was president of my own consulting firmâthings were suddenly going very well. Warner Bros. bought the movie rights to Nathanâs Run two days after the first book rights were sold, and as of this date, the novel has been translated and published in one form or another in over 20 countries. With Nathanâs Run in the can, as it were, I thought I might finally be on to something, but I didnât quit my âday jobâ until after I sold the book and movie rights to my second novel, At All Costs. I figured that while one-in-a-row might be luck, two-in-a-row was a trend. So, I started writing full-time.
More novels followed, and then a few screenplays. I was living the dream.
But I really didnât like it much. I learned pretty quickly that when youâre born a Type-A personality, those extrovert tendencies donât go away just because youâre practicing a craft you love. In fact, after just a couple of years of dream fulfillment, I was pretty frigginâ bored with the company of my imaginary friends, so I did something that Iâve never heard a full-time artist do before: I went back to a day job. At first,...Expand for more
it was just a matter of reactivating my consulting business, but then, in 2004, I was handed my ideal Big-Boy Job (thatâs what my wife calls it) working as the director of safety for a trade association in Washington, DC.
That Big Boy Job lasted ten and a half years, and after that much time in the trenches of the association world, I was ready to take a step back into full-time writing. Over the decade-plus that I was with the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, I figure that I spent close to 2,000 nights in hotel rooms. I have platinum status out the wazoo, and I met hundreds of very nice people, but my wick burned down to the nub and I retired from there in January 2015. You know, itâs funny. When you ask people who choose to leave a job that they liked how they made the decision to leave, the clichéd answer is, âWhen the time comes, youâll know.â Thatâs exactly how it was for me. I just knew.
Iâll keep my hat in the safety consulting ring for a while, mostly as a speaker or a columnist, but I think itâs safe to say that I have filled out my last leave request form.
And I continue to write. In 2006, Six Minutes to Freedom was published to considerable acclaim. My first (and probably last) foray into book-length non-fiction, SixMin tells the story of Kurt Muse, the only civilian of record ever rescued by the super-secret Delta Force. Thanks to Kurtâs cooperation (he is co-author), I gained access to people and places that lifelong civilians like me should never see. The heroic warriors I met during that research turned out to be nothing like their movie stereotypes. These were not only gentlemen, but gentle men, who remained free of the kind of boasting and self-aggrandizement that I was expecting. They were supreme professionals, and very nice guys.
And through them I got the idea for my new series character, Jonathan Grave. Heâs former Delta, released from the Army under circumstances that will be revealed over time, and now heâs a freelance hostage rescue specialist. Heâs the finest friend you could ever have, and the worst enemy. No Mercy, the first entry in the series, hit the shelves in June of 2009, with Hostage Zero following in 2010, Threat Warning in 2011, Damage Control in 2012, High Treason in 2013, End Game in 2014, and Against All Enemies in 2015. If fans continue to like him, and if they enjoy his adventures, thereâll be many more to come.
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