Welcome to day seven of our Indie Author Month, we hope you’ve enjoyed the mixture of features and authors so far. Stick with us, as there are plenty more to come in the next few weeks as even more ‘indies’ share their experiences and books with us… So, who’s here today?

Today’s featured author is Michael Pang…Project manager by profession but modern Renaissance man by nature, Michael Pang has dabbled in many different areas in his career. From working with steam turbines to eventually switching into the world of IT, his plethora of experience highlights his personality – he’s a person always searching for more knowledge.

Michael was born in Hong Kong in 1983. His family immigrated to San Francisco when he was three and eventually landed in Florida. After graduating from high school, Michael gained his degree in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Tech. Despite his currently demanding work schedule, Michael is very involved in activities at his local Project Management Institute Chapter where he fulfills his passion for teaching as the Vice President of Education. But, his desire to serve and help others doesn’t end there, he’s an avid Christian and very active in his local church. He loves kids, with two daughters of his own with his lovely wife, and volunteers at children’s church in his ministry.

He speaks fluent Cantonese and Mandarin and in his free time enjoys reading, writing, eating, cooking, playing music, dancing, singing, and watching musicals. One of his mottos is “Everyday that he hasn’t learned something new is a day wasted.”

So, without further ado, let’s hand you over to the man himself to learn more about how he came to be a writer.

My Writing Journey…so far…

I have always enjoyed reading and writing. However, I never really had a chance to simply sit down and write for fun until I was in my late twenties. About four years ago, my wife and I had our first baby. Months of sleepless nights went by and we both looked like zombies. Then, one night a very strange dream (more like a nightmare) came to me about a teenager working in a mental asylum. The patients there were all gaunt and ghastly with very abrupt demeanor changes. Some of the things the patients were doing were fairly odd and supernatural (like levitating, retrieving objects via telekinesis, and speaking with multi-vocal projections). And I remember wandering to myself, are these people all just insane or demon possessed. Okay, you might wonder, “wow, how did he jump to demon possessed so quickly?” If you saw what I saw in that dream, you would jump to that conclusion too. Then the teenager went into a room and called the patient residing in the room, “mom.” She turned around abruptly, and the expression on her face was terrifying as she pounced on him. I woke up immediately. As shaken from the dream as I was, I couldn’t help wanting to find out what happened to the teenager. I tried to go back to sleep in hopes of getting the dream to continue. But it didn’t work. The next morning, I told my wife about the strange dream and how I had hoped that it had continued when I went back to sleep. So my wife told me that it sounded like it would make an excellent novel and that I should write my own ending.

I guess I would have to say that, it was then that my real writing journey began. Over the past four years, I wrote (and re-wrote continuously) whenever I got a chance. The dream came at a very opportune time when my role in the energy company I worked for changed and I ended up traveling almost every other week. I was constantly on 3-7 hour flights and due to company policy almost had a layover every time. There are only so many movies you can watch on a plane before you are just bored out of your mind, so I took the advantage of the travel times to write. Also, since I worked for the energy industry, I would always be traveling to some sort of power plant or manufacturing plant. There really was not much to do in those areas after work, so I sat in my hotel room and wrote.

Being that my novel borderlines on horror, I kind of spooked myself out a couple of times writing alone in a hotel room. When you are alone, your mind can really go to some strange and dark places. As terrified as I am of the original Exorcist movie, I am mystified as to how I had written two exorcism scenes in my book. I remember re-reading parts of my novel last year and I was like, “Whoa, where did that come from?” Due to some these darker themes of my novel, I really struggled with what the appropriate age group my novel was written for, but I really like the YA genre. I feel that it is the age where everyone gets a chance to venture out and discover who they really are. It gives me so much freedom to infuse that sense of excitement and drama to my book.

As much as I initially thought I loved reading and writing before I started on this project, over the past four years that passion has grown exponentially. Just thinking about having free time to write, gets me so excited. So, with book 1 of the Declan Peters Chronicles released, I am now in the process of writing book 2. I hope that I have as much fun writing it as I did the first one. I just need to work on finding free time to write. Did I just say “free time?” What is that? I vaguely remember what that means….

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   A near tragic incident at the hands of his psychotic mother left Declan Peters alone and with so many questions.

Years later, Declan is determined to find a way to be closer to his mother and takes a job at the institution where she’s being held. That fateful decision will be the impetus for a chain of events so terrifying that Declan will question his own grasp on reality.

What he finds will be more horrifying than anything he’s ever experienced and more dangerous than anything he’s yet known. In a place, rife with demonic possession and sadistic beings, will Declan finally be able to find the answers he’s longed for before its too late or will he succumb to the evil forces that inhabit the institution and all who live there?

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