By The Keystone Newspaper The Three P’s: Patience, Persistence, and Passion
By Kristina Hartz
Grant Rambo, pen-name, G.L.L Rambo, self-published his first novel, “Dead Sun” through Amazon on September 27. Grant is a professional writing major in his junior year at KU.
Photo Credit: Kristina Hartz
Grant stated that writing a book comes down to the three P’s: patience, persistence, and passion. “You need to take your time. You need to want to do it. You are your ultimate challenge. You can shape yourself into whatever you want,” Grant said.
Grant wrote a draft of over 79,000 words in six days for the second book of the four-book “Sun Saga.”
He got the idea for his sci-fi series after completing a prompt for his creative writing class in his senior year at Twin Valley High School. The writing prompt was from a computer app with a word randomizer.
“I got ‘steampunk, sadistic, robot saves the day.’ Ultimately, what I wrote is nothing at all like that, but you can definitely see the DNA of my story going in that direction. I submitted that 12-15-page paper to my creative writing teacher. She loved it. It’s essentially taken off from there,” he said.
After writing the creative short story for his high school class, the thing that motivated Grant to turn the story into a book was a phone call from a friend. Ethan encouraged him to write the book after he had been considering it for about a year. That got him started in the writing process.
“I borrow a lot of what I feel for the characters,” he said. “I focus on emotions and thinking and that’s my personal inspiration. I based one of the main villains on a lot of frustration and evil in life personified. It’s a lot of reflection because when I write the characters and plot it’s me looking inward.”
Grant said Dr. Cory Hutcheson from KU was the one who inspired him to self-publish. “I sent him the first 30 pages of my work and it took off from there,” Grant said. The two would meet on a biweekly basis. “He gave me a lot of constructive criticism and never put down anything I said. He persuaded me to go self-publishing. I did and I think that was a good idea for me. I chose publishing on Amazon, the big corporate entity that it is, because it invites writers.”
Photo Credit: Kristina Hartz
Grant grew up in Morgantown, Pa., in Pennsylvania Dutch country. “Lots of fields of corn, grain, and silos. I’m a Pennsylvanian at heart,” he said.
When not living on campus at KU, Grant lives with his parents and is the third of four siblings, two of whom are also a part of KU.
“My oldest sister, Jacqueline, graduated from KU,” he said. “She studied teaching art and is teaching now. She’s sold her work at galleries. My older brother, Christopher Jr., is in the Navy as a corpsman. The youngest, Wyatt, is here at KU learning about geography.”
He plans to release the following three books soon.