About A. C. Wilson

Amos Christian Wilson is an independent, Christian author, poet and musician. He is also a homeschool graduate, avid reader, outdoor enthusiast, theology nerd, amateur historian, and third-born of twelve siblings. For better or for worse, A. C. Wilson did not attend college, but instead learned a wide range of trade jobs, from carpentry, to piano-tuning, to horse-shoeing. The experience of the everyday, blue-collar worker, therefore is a key focus in his writing. A. C. Wilson seeks to write books which center around strongly religious characters, and immersive world-building. One of his chief interests is fantasy, and the way in which Christianity translates into the fantasy genre. Currently, A. C. Wilson lives with his wife and children in the scenic Flint Hills of Kansas.

I wanted to be an inventor when I grew up. Thomas Edison was my role model: he was homeschooled like me, and he was an inventor. I don’t remember what genius pieces of tech I had decided I was going to invent, because when I was about six, my mother crushed my dreams of becoming an inventor by telling me that to be an inventor I would have to learn math. Since I was not about to learn math, there went my plans of being an inventor. That’s when I decided I would become an author.

I grew up third of twelve siblings, all of us homeschooled. My father worked in Christian ministry for as long as I can remember, and we traveled all across the mid-west and south (though we lived mostly in Colorado) before he accepted a job as a pastor in the Flint Hills of Kansas. As an eleven-year-old, moving from the Rocky Mountains of Colorado to the prairies of Kansas, I was pretty sure I was being exiled to the moon. I’ve always loved the outdoors, and the long hikes with my dad and three brothers traversing mountain trails, or climbing waterfalls, have always been fond memories. I found (to my relief) that Kansas was not indeed flat. While there were no mountains, I quickly fell in love with the undulating, terraced hills and broad river valleys of the Flint Hills. That’s all to say, that love of nature, and the open vistas of prairie and mountain which have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember are powerful inspirations for my writing.

The first I can really remember being inspired about a fantasy world was during family devotions, which we had every evening as a family. My father taught all of us to read Greek and Hebrew, and we would spend about an hour (sometimes longer) every evening studying a passage from the bible, usually in its original language. I will confess to sometimes being bored (sorry, Papa), and when I was bored, I would flip to the back of my bible, and there I would find maps. A good bible should have maps in the back; they’re as important as the text (joking… you can put your stones down now). Obviously, those maps were not fantasy maps, but they may as well have been. Colorado was not on those maps, Kansas was not on those maps. Nothing I knew or experienced was on those maps. And they spoke of a world which bordered on my abilities to imagine, a world that was arid and desert, where thousands of years of history lived in the archeology which surrounded you (Remember that I came from the mid-west of the USA, where we marvel at a hundred-year-old house as ancient history. Our memories only go back to about 1776 anyway). But most incredibly, those maps spoke of a world near to the ocean (that mythical creature which I first remember seeing as a boy of fifteen).

I think it was my attempts to imagine biblical stories, and think about the world where they occurred that first inspired me to imagine fantasy lands. This combined with my father’s bed-time readings of C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, and J. R. R. Tolkien. I remember playing in the backyard with my siblings, usually my younger brother, making up stories I called “my books.” I would boss him around and tell him exactly what he had to do to drive the plot forward (I was such a kind and loving older brother as you can tell…). Usually these games involved killing a lot of orcs, and I would win the heart of the exotic beauty in the end. It was about that time too that I started drawing maps.

From there my world developed, until I grew tired of drawing on flat, two-dimensional paper for a world that should be three-dimensional. So I did what any sane child would do. I stole my mother’s globe, taped blank paper all over the surface of it, and then drew my world on it (Mama didn’t need that globe anyway, it still had the U.S.S.R. on it, and it didn’t have the C.S.A. on it at all, so it was clearly out of date). Once I got the globe figured out, I started naming continents, and coming up with the history of the various countries, this combined with the stories I had already played with my brother in the backyard, and so my world of Gaise was born.

After some awful attempts to write a few of the stories in my head, I decided to hone my writing skills on a different series of stories, completely unrelated to my fantasy world. I was thirteen when I made this decision, and that meant that I got out all my teenage angst and poor writing on a convoluted septology which may or may not see the light of day. Having learned a thing or two about story telling by failing, I then came back to the world of Gaise, but even so it was ten years of writing, revising, then throwing away and re-writing from scratch.

In the middle of all of that, I graduated from homeschool, and then decided the best thing to do for my writing was not to go to college, but to get a wide range of practical experience to inspire my writing (I can thank R. M. Ballantyne for that line of thinking). I threw myself into a variety of trades and interests, ranging from landscaping, bag-piping, horse-shoeing, carpentry, dog-training, organic farming, piano-tuning, sales Scottish Contra dancing, middle-school teaching, and even investing in some black hard plastic swords so that my brothers and I could whack each other over the head and believe that we were learning how to sword fight.

After I fell in love, got married, and had a handful of kids, I wasn’t able to pursue quite as many of these interest, though still I stayed pretty squarely in the blue-collar work-force (as I write this, I work as an appliance delivery and installation technician). My experience working on the manual-labor side of society inspires my approach to writing. For as fun as the stories of grand politics and intrigue are, there are real, every-day people underneath. I think it is more important to the world and cultural atmosphere of a story to know how pots and pans are made, than how laws are made. Wars are only as good as their logistics. Cities are better defined by their trash and sewage systems, than by their mayor’s house. I write my stories, therefore, in a way that centers the experience of the average person in the narrative.

If you hadn’t been able to tell already, Christianity has also played a defining role in shaping me. I grew up in Reformed, conservative, Evangelical circles, and that has done a lot to shape me into who I am. While today I would not categorize myself by any of those three labels, my Christian faith is still the bedrock from which I build my stories. That said, having deconstructed a lot of my Christian upbringing, I hope to bring a diverse voice to faith in my books. I purposefully want to highlight many strains of Christian tradition and not simply one theological system. I believe Jesus is a person who loves us and wants to build a relationship with every one of us — I hope my books can introduce you to Him. I believe that Jesus’ redemption of humankind is the greatest story ever told, and any other story can only echo it. At the end of the day, I strive to make the real world a better place by building Christs’ upside-down kingdom --pursuing His work of justice, redemption, equality, and liberation. This means that I tend to steer away from the Christian cliche of the "gospel presentation" in my books, and instead focus on my characters' personal relationship to God, and how that effect's their actions, their beliefs, and their relationships with other people. If you want more detail about how faith impacts my writing, check out my philosophy page.

The last inspiration for my writing came after I got married, when I discovered history podcasts. I had always loved history, but now at last I could binge it. The look at real people’s lives, real societies, and real cultures changed the way I looked at fantasy. Since I now had a much better grasp of the depth and complexity of actual history, I wanted to replicate that in my stories. This leads me to approach my stories as if I was approaching a historical fiction book, with a strong emphasis on a detailed and realistic atmosphere. I try to do a lot of research on similar cultures and time-periods to the ones I am portraying in my stories, so if you want to see some inspirations behind my stories, check out my bibliography page. I strive for my stories to have a rich cultural, historical, and societal texture behind them.

That’s pretty much all you need to know about me. Just like any other author, I like to curl up with a hot tumbler of coffee, and a good book. Christmas is my favorite holiday, nostalgia is my favorite emotion, and I don’t think I’ll ever grow too old to play with Legos.