First Interview

Thu 11:43 AM, Sep 20, 2012 by Hope Jensen News 12 Augusta, GA

News 12 This Morning / Thursday, Sept. 20, 2012

 

AUGUSTA, Ga. -- He's 18 years old and already a published author.

 

Now, recent Lakeside High grad Jerry Wright says he's already working on his second novel.

 

The book is called "The Basement: Part one of the Sickness trilogy." It's something Wright worked on for three years and says seeing his book in print is a feeling he can't explain.

"It's crazy because I never planned on publishing it when I first wrote it,"

 

Wright said. He started out just writing chapters and uploading them onto the Internet his freshman year of high school.

 

"I used to upload it to this site and just let other people read it. I got some good reviews and some bad reviews. They told me what they didn't like, what they did like," Wright said.

When his father saw the forums, he encouraged him to just write the book.

"What I saw happening was he would write it on a forum and he would send me a link to the forum and I would go there and the one thing that people kept saying was, 'When are you going to write some more to it?' 'I wanna see more,' 'What's gonna happen next?' 'What's gonna happen next?' So he had written so much of it by this time I said, 'Hey look you got enough on there now, why not just go ahead and finish the story?'" said his father.

The book deals with mature subject matter, including murder and rape.

 

"I wasn't afraid to push the envelope in this book," Wright said.

It's something that shocked his father at first, but now has a message of its own.

"I think it helps get the story out about that. That people don't need to be afraid to talk about it because if you have an 18-year-old who can write a book about it, people shouldn't be afraid to speak up about it," said his father.

 

The book is available on Amazon and Kindle and is already selling copies.

"[It's] humbling," Wright said. "Because you don't have to read my book. I'm not something special, I'm not one of them famous authors that you follow along, but people are actually reading it and the better part is that they are actually enjoying it."

Wright enlisted in the military on Monday. He will ship out in February but plans to continue writing. He is already working on part two of the trilogy.

 

If you want to buy the book or just find out more about it, click here.

 

Again, just a reminder, this book does deal with more mature topics, so it is for older audiences.