PJ Haarsma: Author of The Softwire Series.

I began writing late in life. Thirty-eight felt late for me but I think I reached a point where I would try anything. It was very hard to get up in the morning and do what I was doing back then. I had a small production company, I made a movie and now I was shooting corporate spots for clients like Hewlett Packard and Nokia. I had been shooting stills or film for advertising clients for fifteen years. I was spent.I began reading quite a bit then, trying to spark some creativity into my work again. This is when I began journaling. Next I started writing little stories, mostly about growing up. And then one morning JohnnyT appeared on my page.

At first JT was just a bunch of little ideas inspired by an incident that happened in my youth. I'd always been a science nut, I have a degree from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, so I began attaching little tidbits of science to some of the ideas. My wife Marisa encouraged me to keep going and ten months later I finished the first draft.

A lot about The Softwire comes from my own experiences growing up. No, I never travelled on a seed-ship to Orbis but I did feel like I was a slave working in my parents ceramic factory as a teenager. In the summer I would slug 50lbs+ molds around while standing in a room with kilns firing at 1400 degrees. It wasn't fun and at the time I really resented my parents for it. I felt used and not in control of what I wanted. Probably like a lot of other kids my age then but hey, what did I know, I was fourteen.