MILOA: Good afternoon, friends. Miloa here, and today I am with Jarred Garrett, the author of the Finding Home series. I'm super excited to be sitting down with him, asking him some questions about his series, as well as how he became to be such an author.
So, welcome, Jarred. Thank you, Miloa. I appreciate that.
JARRED: It's nice to be with you. I love writing books. Books basically saved my life, so I'm glad that we can talk about them today.
MILOA: I read your bio, and I saw that you're a Tolkien and Middle-earth fan, just like myself. I've been playing Lord of the Rings Online now for 12-plus years.
JARRED: Oh, wow. You're a pro. That's awesome. So, really into the lore and everything.
MILOA: I just love Tolkien overall. So, my question to you, just to kick things off, is what is your favorite scene in Lord of the Rings Online?
JARRED: I actually recently re-read the books, and by re-read, I mean I listened to them. And fun almost fact, I think theory, is the guy who did the recording of the audiobook, Rob Inglis, I think maybe the actors in the movies listened to him because they grabbed his accents and voices really well.
Andy Serkis sounds a lot like... Anyway. So, I think about the scenes that have left a mark. You've got Samwise picking up Frodo.
That's big. You've got actually that powerful moment of Frodo making the decision that he has to leave his friends behind because he doesn't want to put them in danger, and he knows this is his own burden. I think that's a really powerful, sacrificial scene of his.
But my actual favorite scene, because it stirs me in ways that nothing else does, is Boromir with the big temptation of Boromir, where he has the moment of trying and trial, and the temptation makes sense. His motivation isn't selfish. He wants to save Gondor.
He wants to save his people. He's loyal to his father and to his people, and he wants to be the person they need him to be. But you can't do that with an evil object.
You just can't. And so there's such a powerful moment of him finding that he really wants it. He's tempted, and he gives in to that temptation, and then he redeems himself.
The redemption of Boromir, saving the other halflings, is huge. It's powerful in the movies and in the books. It's so good.
And then the final scene of brotherhood between Boromir and Aragorn, and there's almost a benediction from Aragorn to Boromir, saying kind of, well done. You have fulfilled your oaths. I find that moving.
It makes me weep a little bit, actually, each time I read it or watch it.
MILOA: Yeah, yeah. This time of year, I was recently learned that people have now classified the Lord of the Rings movies as the cozy movies to watch over Christmas.
And I was fascinated by that, because I was like, yeah, my family's been doing that for so many years already. Okay, I didn't know that it was a Christmastime thing.
JARRED: We do watch them as a family every year, but it's during spring break.
MILOA: Yeah, for us, it's become over Christmas. It's our cozy Christmas movie that we watch, and we just turn it on and let it play.
That's wonderful. Yeah, I was so fascinated when I saw that. I'd have to say my favorite scene has to do with Gimli, where he's like, certainty of death, all odds against us, and what are we waiting for? That kind of whole attitude of Gimli, always being willing to sacrifice whatever it takes to get the job done in order to be there for his friends and make a difference.
JARRED: That, to me, is also so powerful in his character art. He's a hero because you could have a sense of humor during those tense moments. Exactly.
MILOA: That's powerful. Exactly. In the line of like, don't tell the... Toss me, and then don't tell the elf.
That's awesome. I love that comedic relief in those very, very tense moments, but he's a fascinating character to me. Your bio mentions how books were a refuge to you as a child.
Can you share a specific story or book that profoundly influenced you to start writing?
JARRED: Yeah. Books did a lot of things for me. Being the refuge that they were from the unusually unique and bad childhood I had.
Just quick context, I escaped from a cult when I was 17. It was an abusive, very unstable cult. Books were the stable place.
They were a place that I could just go for something special that could lift me and take me away. I have a lot of books that really got me writing and got me thinking about writing, and some that really put me in the right direction. One book, A Bridge to Terabithia, it made me so engaged.
Jesse in that book is a young boy who thinks he can run faster than he does, which is a lot like me and many other young boys who think we run faster than we do. He is in an unstable, uncertain family relationship. It's strained and tense.
Mine wasn't even strained and tense. I just didn't really have a family, but it felt familiar to me. Then he makes a friend who he ultimately loses, and it deals with grief and loss and finding your way back into a loving family relationship in a beautiful way.
It made me cry like a maniac. It was really a hard one to read, but it was beautiful. It made me think, I want to make other people cry.
Then the Icewood and Dale trilogy from R.A. Salvatore. It's in the Forgotten Realms series. It's the same world as the original Dungeons and Dragons.
R.A. Salvatore burst on the scene with this incredible trilogy. It's just this sweeping, almost epic story of different races and people transcending the expectations of their societies, coming together to form a special group of people with a beautiful dynamic and become heroes. They challenge all the mores of their societies, but they also fight for what's right and fight for what's good and fight for love.
That series is probably what really got me to the point of saying, I'm writing books. This is my love. This is what I'm going to do.
MILOA: What led you to choose clean, heroic stories as your primary focus?
JARRED: When I was 13, I'm going to be a little specific. When I was 13, I read a book called It by Stephen King. He was my favorite writer.
I think he's a very good writer. That book left the kind of mark on me that I didn't want. I didn't like the way I felt when I finished that book.
I won't be too specific about the scenes, but it's pretty not good, some of the stuff that happens in that book. He does it on purpose and it has the effect he wants it to have, but I didn't like the way it made me feel. Books like that, which I used to read back in my misspent youth, made me feel a way I didn't like.
I thought, well, why don't I write? When I write, I'm going to write not from anger, not from vindictiveness. I'm going to write from a place of peace and love and try to help people feel really good about what they read. I mean, there's still going to be challenging things.
There's still going to be loss. There's still going to be very difficult choices to make, but it'll always be clean. That is how it'll be for me.
I made that decision, I think, when I was 27 or 28. I was just like, you know, perfectly clean, squeaky clean, whatever you call it, but heroic because that's what I read. I want to read a hero.
I want to read something that's aspirational for me, somebody I can see myself in and see myself becoming like that a little bit, the finer qualities of sacrificing what needs to be sacrificed for the interest of doing what's right, saving a family member or being with somebody who you know you need to be with, or even just stopping very bad guys from doing very bad things. I love it, and I want there to be unequivocal heroism in the stories I write. Anti-heroes aren't for me.
I like it, so that's what I write.
MILOA: Follow-up question to that. Did you find that when you made that decision, people wanted to, you know, pigeonhole your books as young adult or new adult?
JARRED: There's no question that my books are seen as having an audience of young adult, and I think you're onto something there.
That is very common, you know, for heroic, clean, for it to be YA, but I also don't mind, because the readers who read books like what I write know that they can find it in the YA audience, usually. Not all YA audiences are like that, but they know they can find it there, so I still have plenty of readers of all ages. I'm not too worried about it.
MILOA: Because I'm in this boat as well. I write clean, heroic stories, and I found that I keep getting comments like, well, you know, this is really young adult, and it's not really, you know, so a question to you is, having been further along in this process than I am, when you go to market your books, do you market it specifically towards young adults, or do you market it to a larger audience?
JARRED: I go, for the age demographic, when I'm actually trying to do targeted marketing, I go all ages, because even if I go too old, their grandkids can read the books. But I have talked to 13-year-olds on up about my books, and had people age 13 on up read my books.
Really fun experience was actually having an 11-year-old buy a book from me on day one of a three-day event, came back on day three and bought the rest of the series, and then raved to me about how much he loved the first book, and I was like, this is the greatest thing that ever happened. I mean, it hasn't happened since. It'd be nice if it had, but that's okay.
Yeah, I target to all ages, and again, readers know what they like, and they know how to find their stuff that they like, so I think it's okay to trust the readers to find stuff, although I'm not great at finding them sometimes. Well, thank you for indulging me and answering that question, because it's been bugging me the past couple of weeks. It can be hard.
MILOA: Yeah, so the Finding Home series, tell me more about that. How is that inspired by your life, and how do you specifically navigate balancing between personal experience versus what is fictional in a book?
JARRED: I think all authors, there's a lot of truth from themselves and from the world that they've experienced in their writing, so I think that that is something that I'm just comfortable with, but the Finding Home series specifically, it's a four-book series, and the this young man, lo and behold, who's been born and raised in a cult, and all he knows is the cult, it's unstable, there's physical and emotional and all kinds of abuse. So the story follows this young man, who is 100% me, going through this life in the cult and trying to find his way out, and the whole series then follows him finding his way out, chasing the girl he's fallen in love with across the country, and then trying to be with her, and it worked a lot harder than he thinks, because when you have abuse like that in your childhood, it leaves a mark, and so on.
But ultimately, there's a very happy ending, and the last book is, I'm very proud of it. I'm proud of all of them, but the balance is an interesting thing, because I basically just tried to write a lot of things that I experienced and went through in the context of the cult, and the context of the cult is 100% accurate in these books. It's exactly how the cult was, and almost all the events in book one are actually from my life.
That balance though, you have to skew towards readability, engagement, maybe pace as well, and structure, and so after figuring out the story that I was trying to tell in draft, it actually took me two or three drafts to figure out exactly what the story was really supposed to be by the end of that one. I think it was the third draft. Once I had that, then I went back and said, you know what, this event doesn't need to be here, or this event is not so important to be here, and let's put it somewhere else.
So yeah, I wrote the truth, and then I fictionalized where I needed to be for the structure of the book. I mean, I had an entire second main character fictionalized in order to have the book be a more engaging experience, because otherwise book one is a lot of inside the head of this kid who's really, really kind of messed up, and really doesn't know what to do. So having somebody else be an external influence was really important.
So anyway, it's a challenge, but it was a good challenge. I liked it. So freedom, peace, and happiness are core themes in your series.
MILOA: Why are these themes important for readers to explore in today's culture? Well, I don't know. I mean, we do live in the most peaceful time on the planet ever. Maybe not actually.
You know, the world is very noisy, both in our everyday life on the road, in our workplace sometimes, in school certainly, especially public schools in the U.S. Kind of disruptive, and noisy, and all a muck. Good word. I like a muck.
There's just a lot of noise, and there's also a lot of people who just really aren't sure where to find happiness and meaning. And you know, I have been that person, and I think that I have found what I need to find, or where I need to be in order to be on the right path towards ultimate peace, and happiness, and freedom. But I want my books to be an escape.
I want them to be a refuge, and I do want them to be aspirational. You know, the message is not the most important thing, but it's there that you can take responsibility for yourself, and you can let go of the things that don't, that you have no control over, and you can be at peace, and even be free just in your mind, even if you're still stuck in a stupid cult. It's important, I think.
People need that, and people have always gotten that from stories, you know. Stories handed down for years and years, that people just, it feels like home when we're hearing those stories. But I think people want it, I think people need it, and I love to write it.
Freedom especially is important. You know, it's very important for us all to find our freedom from whatever it is that's holding us back. So what do you hope readers, especially young adults, will take away from the Finding Home series? Well, you know, it's kind of a stark, pretty awful picture that's painted in especially in the first book, and then the issues with just the disorders that come from that kind of trauma, those are very accurate and pretty strong.
So one, I hope that one message is it's not as bad as they think it is. It's never as bad as they think it is. They're never alone.
Other people are experiencing things too, but really more importantly than that is that there is a lot more power, a lot more strength, and a lot more capacity to make changes in their circumstances, in their mental, emotional circumstances, as well as their physical circumstances. I want people to come away from those books knowing that it's never too late to fix something. It's never too late to go get healing and hope.
I had a guy who I think is two years older than me. He looks two years older than me. Read my books and come back after reading all of them and saying, well, Jarred, these are really good.
I didn't expect to like these kinds of books, young adult coming-of-age books so much, but I couldn't put them down, and I just called a girl I broke up with 30 years ago to apologize for the way I handled that situation, and it was because of your books. There it is. We all have that power.
We can always, it's never too late to make something better and to be better. Maybe that's the message.
MILOA: So, on your wall, I see there's a sword and a dagger. What are those from?
JARRED: Oh boy. Okay, so what you have up there, real quick, that's at the very top is a Japanese longbow. I learned that while we were in Japan. The second one down is anduril.
Argon sword. The next one down is actually sting, more of a short sword, and these are real replicas of the actual weapons from the movies. I really like to collect blades.
I have so many, and actually behind, let's see, on that side next to the Frank Frazetta, I've got two other dirks. Anyway, yeah, I love swords. I love blades so much.
MILOA: Yeah, I thought I spotted anduril back there.
JARRED: That's a sharp eye. Very impressive.
MILOA: That's why I asked. Winning a primetime game show must have been a unique experience. Can you tell me more about that and how that shaped your creative journey?
JARRED: Yeah, that's an interesting question.
It actually did boost some things. So, the show was called The Hustler. It only had two seasons.
I was in season two, episode six. The concept is very simple. It's five people are sitting in a study slash library being asked trivia questions.
They all have to agree on the answer. They give the answer to the trivia question. If they get it right, money goes into the bank.
If they get it wrong, they don't get any money in the bank. The twist is that two of those people are going to be kicked off after the first round and the second round of questions, and they're going to be kicked off by The Hustler. The Hustler is one of them.
They've been given all the answers, so they want to get all the answers right, but they need to help the others get the answers right without being detected as The Hustler. So, they have to do some kind of psychology and acting and lying and a little bit of manipulation, maybe a lot, actually. It was hosted by Craig Ferguson, that wonderful Scottish gentleman who's extremely foul-mouthed and brilliant.
I love the man. It was really fun. So, that was the concept of the show.
I got on, and I was The Hustler. I have a bit of an interesting background, and they thought hustlers should have interesting backgrounds. I won.
I just absolutely, utterly demolished those poor, poor people. I don't gamble, so that was good, but it was really great. I won a good chunk of money, and the IRS took a large amount of it, and then the rest went into the house and a couple of trips for the family.
I've got seven kids, so trips are expensive, extremely expensive. That was really fun, and I wish I could go back and watch it, but it's not online anymore. I felt like that was me kind of digging as deep as I could into the skills and abilities that I developed.
Granted, they were lying, but I have this ability to act. I'm a pretty good actor, and I have an ability to build rapport with people, and I used them for my own very selfish purposes in that experience, but having those abilities be tested as hard as they were and needing to be creative and dig as deep as I could to get it to do it right was such a good test of how much do I want this? What am I willing to put in? Am I willing to go for it all? I was willing in the moment to go for it all, because what's the point of not, as it turned out? That was awesome for me, and since then, I've actually been more productive as a writer. I've had more ideas as a writer.
I think my books got a little better, because I'm a little more willing to say, why not just do the craziest thing now? Some people, or not some people, me, I had a problem where I'd be like, well, I got to save this really cool scene for the end, because it's the coolest scene I can come up with. I'm going to put that right here and tell myself I have to get better. I have to do something better at the end.
It's going to be hard, but let's go. I mean, it's a boost in confidence as well to know that I can do a really hard, challenging thing, even if it, again, is lying and manipulating. Yeah, but I was good friends with those people at the end.
I mean, at the end, I gave them hugs and said thank you and walked away smiling.
MILOA: You just kind of have to check it up, too. It's a game.
JARRED: Yeah, it was a game. Yeah, absolutely. If it hadn't been gambling, I wouldn't have done it.
I don't gamble, but it was just a game. Nobody else put money up. It was awesome.
Sorry, I can't tell you where to find it, because I think it's been offline for two years. Okay. Sadly.
MILOA: What's the weirdest moment that you've had with a fan, but that ended up being super cool?
JARRED: Okay, this was cool. I'm so glad you asked that. Oh my gosh.
Okay, so I was at a three-day event again. It was in Salt Lake City. I live near there.
I check my reviews, I don't know, every couple of days, every week or two if I'm really busy. I saw a review a couple of days after it was posted, and it was about Beyond the Cabin. It said, this is a strange, beautiful, bittersweet thing, referring to my book.
I read this glowing, heartfelt review about how this book will break you in all the right places and put you back in the right way. I was like, what is happening here? It was wild. I didn't quite know what to do with myself, but I posted it all over the socials.
Tried to not get too emotional about it. Then the dude showed up at my booth at this big event, and he literally came running, screeching to a halt. You could almost hear, and he said, I've been looking for you.
I wanted to give you a hug and thank you for your book. I was like, what is happening? It was awesome. I gave him a big hug and we chatted for a little while and it moved on.
It didn't get creepy or weird. It was just, this is a cool dude who just totally loves my book. It was awesome.
MILOA: That's so cool. If you could bring one of your fictional characters to life and spend a day with them, who would it be and what would you do?
JARRED: Okay. If I were single, I would bring back, I would bring Simra to life from my Gaiden, the sword trilogy from, which is not in the Finding Home.
It's actually on my science, fiction and fantasy side, because she's amazing, but she's also modeled after my wife. So I'm already good about her. I would actually bring the hero from those stories to life.
So I write science fiction and fantasy with my pen name, which is Jerry Ironspear. And the main character of this ancient American fantasy thriller series is called Laconi. I loved writing this character.
He's so much fun and he's kind of too serious. I would take him for a burger and I would take him go-kart racing and probably, I don't know, mini golf. Just, you know, get the guy loosening up a little bit.
Maybe give him some root beer until he chills out a little bit. Yeah, I think it'd be fun to have him come around and chill out a little because he was tightly wound. You face a lot of adventures in your books.
MILOA: What is the biggest real life adventure that you've had?
JARRED: Until I was about 19, I was on a path that is your usual young man, dude, bachelor life, going off on doing whatever he wants with whomever he wants and all this stuff. But I changed my path when I was about 19. And one year later, I went to Brazil for two years on my own to work to move forward on this path.
And that was probably the most insane thing I think I have ever done. You know, not knowing at all what I was getting into, hardly knowing anything about the work I was going to be doing down there and not speaking a word of Portuguese. Turns out I have a really good brain for languages, though.
In six months, I was fluent. It was pretty cool. But yeah, I think that's probably the biggest kind of jump and what's going to happen, I don't really know, type thing that I've done.
MILOA: For me, it was moving to Ecuador for six months.
JARRED: Ecuador. Oh, that's cool.
I've only been to Brazil and South America. I'd love to go down to Ecuador.
MILOA: I went there for a mission strip for six months.
Didn't speak a lick of Spanish. Similar, dove right in both feet, was looking for an adventure. Had so much fun doing that.
JARRED: That's awesome. People are just warm too. They're just so warm.
MILOA: And for me, it really sparked in me the desire to be an author in the sense that while I was there, I found that since there wasn't a lot of people around me that spoke English, I had to find a way to communicate my emotions and what I was experiencing. And so I decided to do that in story form. And so a lot of those experiences actually made it into my first book.
And how to deal with a culture that you have no basis or no understanding about and how to overcome all the obstacles and become part of the community.
JARRED: That sounds awesome. Yeah, yeah.
That's a really cool experience right on. Yeah, mine was a mission trip too. Yeah, that was my adventure.
MILOA: But yeah, it definitely changed my perspective.
JARRED: Yeah, probably long-term friendships too, right? And deep connections with people.
MILOA: I sure do.
I stayed with a Spanish-speaking family there, who I still have a connection to now, many, many years later, almost 20 years later.
JARRED: That's beautiful. I love it.
MILOA: For more details on Jarred Garrett, check out his book and his information on his website, jarredgarrett.com. The link will be in the descriptions below. You can also find out more about my book, Wings of Steel, on my website, miloascape.com, also in the link below. And thank you so much, Jarred, for hanging out with me today.
Thank you, everybody, for watching. And until next time, happy hunting.
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