Tony Bertauski
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Tony Bertauski

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My writing career began with magazine columns, landscape design textbooks, and a gardening column for the Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina. But fiction was always the thing tugging at me in the background, the place I wanted to end up once the practical work was done. My grandfather never graduated high school. He retired from a steel mill in the mid-1970s, formally uneducated but relentlessly curious. His house was lined with shelves of battered paperback science fiction, and I remember the smell of old paper as I pulled down Piers Anthony and Isaac Asimov, promising to return them intact. I was fascinated by robots that could think and feel like people, and by the unsettling question that followed them everywhere: what happens when they die? I’m a cynical reader. I expect a writer to take hold of me early and not let go until the last page. I’d rather sail a boat than climb a mountain, and I want stories that move, surprise, and carry momentum, not the kind of assigned reading that felt more like endurance than discovery. I want to write the kind of books that keep you up too late. Having a story unfold inside your head is different from simply reading words on a page. You connect with characters in ways that feel personal and intimate. You empathize with them, root for them, grieve with them. The challenge is convincing a reader to feel even a fraction of what the writer feels while creating the story, and that challenge is never easy. In 2008, I won the South Carolina Fiction Open for Four Letter Words, a short story inspired by my grandfather and Alzheimer’s disease. My first step into novels came from a much smaller, more personal goal: encouraging my young son to read. That story became The Socket Greeny Saga, a series that explores my long-standing fascination with consciousness and identity through the lens of a young adult trying to understand his place in the world. After Socket, I thought I was finished with fiction. Then the ideas kept coming, and I kept writing. Much of my work examines the human condition and the meaning of life, just not in ordinary ways. About half of it is Young Adult fiction, including Socket Greeny, Claus, and Foreverland, because that age of uncertainty and self-definition is endlessly compelling to me. I also venture into adult fiction, like Halfskin and Drayton, where the language gets rougher and the gloves come off. Either way, entertainment always comes first. And yes, I’m a big fan of plot twists.
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