Tell us about the Chronicle series.

OK, well, the Chronicle series, it's kind of a loaded question and a long answer, but I'll keep it fairly short.

I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

I was an only child.

I really liked movies.

I like books.

I like movies, to be quite honest with you.

How much of that do you think is purposeful and how much do you think of that as just... unintentional, not that there's not an agenda, but how much of that do you think is an intentional focus for storytelling?

Yeah.

And a lot of it is just based on just who people are.

Um, so when you read the background about who someone is, you should probably understand that some of what they believe or what you read about in their background or their history, experience, uh, beliefs are gonna be incorporated into the story because really, if you're on your deathbed and you go, "Oh, I wrote this incredible work," not just me, but, you know, anybody, Sanderson or C.S. Lewis or whoever, um, they're gonna want to feel like the things they believed are the things they wrote about to some extent.

Or otherwise, it's like, it's almost the opposite, like they're- flat out lying if they're trying to really hide it.

Um, you know, like C.S. Lewis used to say, I paraphrase this, you know, every moment in our, in our life when we're interacting with people, we're either leading them in one direction or the other.

Um, when you look at Tolkien, he spent 12 years putting a lot of his Catholicism into the Lord of the Rings, which people may or may not pick up on.

Um, but, but that was a driving force behind the Lord of the Rings for him.

Yeah.

If you had five minutes, what would you say to the world?

Well, there's lots of things to say.

But if I only had five minutes to say something, I would say, and I would be talking to every individual person, and I would say, God loves you.

He proved it.

We know it from John 3.16.

He sent his son to save us.

And that you and me and everybody listening is very special.

Beneath all the adventure, what message are you hoping readers will carry into their lives?

What do you mean by that? I said before, and why do you think stories become most powerful when they blow the boundary between imagination and lived experience?

Yeah.

So like, just like this, when you and I are talking or when any of the listeners out there are talking with people that they know, their friends, their family, whatever, and they're conveying a story of something that happened to them and maybe what they learned from it, or having a discussion with them like the characters in all of our stories have.

I think that's important because that's who we are.

We're very social people.

And that's how we learn things, by discussing things with others, as well as thinking about them with ourselves.

So I mean, characters, like a lot of times when I'm writing a story, I'll have the characters talk to each other and actually lead me where they want me to go, Because a lot of times they pick up subconscious things in my mind that I don't really think about unless they're talking to each other.

So the second part, I was asking what has happened world building, told you about the real world that we inhabit.

you know,

young.

And so I wanted to tell them they could have a voice too.

You know, it's not just books, aren't something magic.

You can write someday, whatever.

So I wrote a short story and then five years later, I wrote a longer one when they became teenagers, you know, just for fun.

And I, and I was kind of thinking too, you know, maybe someday when I'm old and I can't run around anymore, I'll, I'll have something to do if I start doing this.

And I'm

So for those meeting you for the first time, Who is Terrence and what has your journey look like for military service to become in an October?

Yes, thank you for asking.

So I grew up in a state called Wisconsin here in the United States.

And I was an only child on a very small piece of land.

And I always dreamed of having a bigger place to live.

And then I went off to the Air Force Academy for four years, which was a very complicated and difficult.

a difficult school here.

What kept you motivated through such a massive project? So I'd have to

So can you quickly tell us about your journey from serving in the United States Air Force to becoming a full-time author?

Sure.

So, yeah, I never really planned on being an author.

I didn't really like doing all the English and writing stuff and that when I was young.

I went to the Air Force Academy and had four years of heavy discipline and duty and purpose pumped into me and a very challenging academic and physical and military career there.

Really, it was like a career.

That four years is probably the longest four years of my life.

What is one life experience you've had or one life wisdom that has been imparted on you over the years that whenever you see young people, you are pushed to talk to them about it?