About Joe Taucher

No life story here, just how I became a writer...

I won't pretend to have had a desire to write books since I was in diapers, but I will say that I discovered my first inklings to write in sixth grade.  

We were instructed to write short stories every week and to read them aloud for the class.  I looked forward to this assignment more than any others, and in my own mind I was pretty good at spinning a yarn.  Good grades appeared to confirm it.

As a junior in high school, I wrote a short story I wrote about a young African American boy who unknowingly walked into a KKK meeting being held in a church on the forbidden "other side of the tracks."  In the end, the boy narrowly evaded a rush of men in white sheets and returned home to his mother who hugged him and promised to explain everything to him when he was older.  Themes of true, youthful innocence contrasted with the false righteousness of the men in symbolically white sheets, meeting in a church?  Not a bad attempt at symbolism for a high-schooler right?

I received a C+ on this assignment and was infuriated, so infuriated that I asked my senior year English teacher to look at it a year later, and regrade it as though I was still a junior.  I should have realized that my vocal ranting about the bad grade given to me from one of her fellow colleagues made it unlikely that she would agree with me and not have the teacher's back.

Sure enough, she said a C+ was the correct grade.  Not exactly a blind taste test.

Eventually I got over the personal injustice, and after obtaining a bachelor's degree in computer science from The Master's College in Santa Clarita, CA and my Juris Doctorate from The Ventura College of Law, I've finally completed my first novel, Brenden Swift and the Vulgren's Curse.  

Enjoy!