By Guest Blogger Tom McClintock
We've been excited by Jack Meyer's debut as a brand-new author in Colorado Springs. His book, a suspense thriller, is Wayward Patriot: Preserving the Vote.
I interviewed Jack and learned some interesting things about our town's newest literary sensation. Meyer grew up in Colorado Springs and graduated from Wasson in 1973. He went away to college and returned 38 years later to start a successful business which eventually sold to help fund his retirement in 2020. It was then that he finally had time to work on his first novel, something he had thought about for twenty years.
“I always enjoyed writing and thought I would like to try writing fiction,” Jack recounts. “I began to think seriously about writing a book after the 2000 election. That election was contested, and the state of Florida conducted a manual recount of all ballots before George W. Bush was designated President-elect in December. At that time, I watched television coverage of election workers staring at computer punch cards with ‘hanging chads’ and ‘dimpled chads.’ I thought to myself, a rigged election would make a great premise for a thriller.” He said he only wrote a few pages over the next few years, and other responsibilities always took priority so the book was never written. In 2020, after he saw another election contested, in a different way, and that was the prompt he needed to return and explore further that first idea. Based upon the title of his book, and recent Republican cries of election manipulation, we asked Meyer if his story targets a conservative audience. His response was, “Absolutely! And liberals too!”
The premise of the book is that a new, high-tech voting system appears to have been manipulated, but there is no political agenda in the book. “Both Democrats and Republicans have made claims of unfair elections since 2016. Election integrity is not a partisan issue,” Jack commented. “More importantly, the book doesn’t deal with political issues. It does take the reader through lots of surprises, twists, and turns as the main character discovers evidence of election manipulation and murder. Whoever is responsible knows of his discovery and will do whatever it takes to keep him quiet.” Our community’s newest author says that he is working on his second book in what he envisions to be a series. “While the books won’t necessarily follow one character, they will deal with patriotic people who are so passionate about doing what they believe is right for their country, that they step over the line of ethics, resulting in tragic consequences.”
Jack's hope is that the next book in the Wayward Patriot series will be on the shelves and awaited by eager fans of the first book sometime in 2024.
Comments