John's active imagination has been a driving force throughout his life, and writing naturally became a frequent medium of expression for that creative drive. From a young age, his voracious appetite for reading coupled with that imagination led him to create his own worlds and stories, and that genesis is reflected throughout his work as strong themes reflecting the importance and power of both youth and imagination.
In elementary school alone, John read several hundred books. His tastes tended toward the more imaginative genres like science fiction, fantasy, and the adventure tales young boys have teethed upon for generations, which would later influence his writing in both genre and style.
At age eleven, he and a friend created several spaceship designs as a friendly competition, and John's final design became the Exerda, whose crew soon found themselves penned into adventures in comic-book form at John's hand. It was not to be long before those accountings of battles with space aliens would make the transition from crude colored-pencil drawings to prose.
Though his writing has come a long way from those early, often-fumbling attempts, the Exerda represents the starting point that John looks back upon with understandable fondness.