SALT LAKE CITY, UT May 16, 2013
Although WiDo Publishing™ is located in Salt Lake City, Utah, the headquarters for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it publishes very little of what is known as LDS or Mormon-based fiction. “Not because we don’t want to,” states acquisitions editor Allie Maldonado, “but with several excellent publishers of LDS fiction, we just don’t get a lot of submissions in that category which work for us.”
However, when Steven Anderson’s sample chapters popped up on Allie’s computer, she could not stop reading. “It’s like a Mad Max movie re-make for Mormons. The premise is fascinating– the final days on earth before the coming of Christ–and the action is non-stop.”
Jared Crandall never expected to see his old missionary companion again. It had been over twenty years. With the quake having broken up the roads throughout the country and the world, isolating Jared in his cabin in the middle of Utah, he expected to die alone, but Keith Martin had found him. Keith had arrived on the most unusual of motorcycles and said he had come from church headquarters with a personal letter for Jared from the prophet—he had been called to serve again—to the east across a desolate land that had changed so drastically. What the two companions were to do was unsaid—Nephi-like they were to go forward and let God lead them. It was a call that Jared could not refuse.
Author Steven Anderson is also a television and film actor, so if his photo looks familiar, you have probably seen him in one of the hundreds of movies, TV shows or commercials he has appeared in.
When asked why he submitted his second novel to WiDo, Anderson said, “I was impressed with their web site and the attention they give to the books they put out. Although indicating that they generally didn’t do LDS fiction, I sent them some sample chapters anyway. They wanted to see more and eventually offered a contract, even though the word count was larger than they wanted. I believed that if they were willing to publish a book that was too long, written in a genre that they usually avoided, then they must really like the book and would work to make it successful. If they were up for the challenge, than so was I.”
Besides working as an actor, Steven Anderson has been a radio announcer and a high school English teacher for thirty years in the Salt Lake area. He served an LDS mission to Rome, Italy, was a pitcher at a junior college in Illinois and is married with five children. His first book was The Ashes of the Red Heifer: the Final Battle (Granite, 2004).