About

Lawrence L. Lapin

I have spent most of my adult life as a writer. Most of that effort was spent writing college text books in statistics and quantitative methods for business and engineering. I was a professor at San Jose State University for all of that time. I also developed two major educational software packages and the ancillary manuals and workbooks to accompany them.

Of course novel writing is more fun than textbooks, which themselves were playthings compared to software. One of the paradoxes of fiction writing is that I do not have full control, as I did with my text books. The characters seem to take over and sometimes pull the stories in unplanned directions. That never happened with my statistics books; characters in those books had very limited lives, confined to a short example or a problem or two.

Snippets in my stories that are a bit autobiographical. Those were not conscious decisions on my part, but they are there probably because my writing took a path of least resistance. Notable pieces of my life appearing in the Boatwright Chronicles are pigeon raising and delivering newspapers, which Adam did at about the same age as I. We also share a love for movies. I grew up on a navy base, and for ten cents I saw five films a week for over ten years, nearly every movie made during that time. And, like me, Adam is a professor.
Adam is someone who I would want to be. He is my icon, but very much unlike me. I am more of a Clark Kent, while Adam is Superman. But I can be Superman only in my dreams.

The major theme of the Boatwright trilogy jumped into my mind on a long walk. (Walks also led to many of Adam’s brainstorms, another shared similarity.) I was mourning for the planet that was, worrying about the future, all the while contemplating my own mortality. This fantasy story popped into my head about a Noah’s arc saving the world after a future disaster. Adam would be the latter-day Noah and his arc would be a cavern. Instead of a flood, we would have a meteor. The end result would be a utopia, free from many of the problems facing our world. My hero would have to be long-lived to pull it all off. He would be a geneticist and doctor. Simple.
It took fourteen years to get the three books written. Most of that time was spent doing other things. I was actively writing the novels only for the equivalent of two years, a few months at a time, during that period.

My books do not fall into one of the standard categories: thriller, mystery, science fiction, or romance. I have elements of all four. The stories are much more real than is typical of science fiction, with just one or two twists involving fictional science. They are more love stories than romance. (My hero is already an old married man, just like me.) I think they are thrilling tales, but they do not frighten. I don’t tease the reader too long with my mysteries. But the suspense is compelling and fits nicely into the bigger pictures. There are many spiritual and social issues are raised in the stories. Those themes are woven completely into the plots.

Perhaps my textbook experience led to my fiction-writing style. I like to explain things. There is a logical progression. In my humble opinion, it all seems to hang together. My stories move fast. A few chapters could be fodder for an entire book by other writers. Some characters are purposely wooden because they don’t need full development. My books are neither travelogues nor artwork on display. I leave some scenes to the imagination. It’s the story that matters.