Meet the Author

The Author Bio

Ryan Keith Johnson was born in Stillwater MN and grew up in Somerset WI. He got interested in writing in third grade and in fifth grade he decided to start writing a novel. In junior high, he started writing poems and song lyrics. The first two novels were fantasy and in the beginning of his freshman year he started writing a science fiction-fantasy. The second science fiction-fantasy ended up being 850 pages handwritten.

     Johnson handwrote his novels because he could not afford a laptop and because he was working on his books and poetry while he was in class.  When Johnson graduated from high school, he had finished eight books, including a children’s book and ele
ven song lyric and poetry books. He went on to college for Mechanical Design but didn’t like it. It wasn’t a total loss because he continued to write and the stories that were created was; “The King’s Retribution”, “Lion Ascend” , “The Temple of the Incubus” , “An Angel Visit” , “Faded Memories Do Become Real” , “The Flesh Beast” and “Fire Starter”. A short story called “The Insect Behind My Eye” was written in his Advance English Class on his senior year in high school.

      From 2000 to 2006 Johnson continued to work on revising and re-working “The King’s Retribution” until it reached 150 pages typed up. There were some notes and outlines for additional ideas to put into the novel. For some time, Johnson developed his style and writing process and had created his own system of writing in scenes. When it came time to publish with Xulon Press, Johnson had to cookie cut the story from pieces of the novel to make his deadline. While in editing process the story was written in a way that was like Romeo and Juliet. The scenes were stiff with a lot of adjectives and fancy dialogue. Originally, Lion Ascend was going to be chosen but the story could not make the deadline. It was barely 20 pages and the requirement for the project required the book to be at least 45 pages.

  

     In 2011, Johnson published Lion Ascend, What I Think About You, Song Lyrics and Poetry and The Temple of the Incubus. In 2012, Johnson went on a writer’s binge and wrote 73 short stories. He decided to combine it with 200 song lyrics, some of which were written in high school. He added 20 illustrations that he had been producing since 2000 for an animation position that fell through and took the scenes that he didn’t have in The King’s Retribution and created another story based on the same book, which was called “The Culminate Amethyst”. With the combined short stories, poems and illustrations with the novella he created the Red and Blue Dragon Fantasy Legacy Anthology of Compositions and Short stories. The title was shortened to “The Legacy Anthology” to make it manageable. The author decided that he could cut sections of the book to create more books. The Culminate Amethyst was never intended to be published as a separate book, but rather a bonus to The Legacy Anthology.  

   

 In 2014, Johnson published “Blue Dragon Fantasy; Faded Memories and Short Stories”, which was a collection of 32 short stories. The story consisted of the same short stories from 1997 in college when he wrote Faded Memories Do Become Real, The Flesh Beast, An Angel Visit, Fire Starter and The Insect Behind My Eye. The author decided to produce trilogies with The Flesh Beast, An Angel Visit and Fire Starter. He had continued to write these first wave of short stories from 1997 to 2010 and then continued writing the second wave of short stories in the year of 2012.  

     In 2016-2017, Johnson decided to publish “An Angel’s Whisper”, “The Culminate Amethyst” and “Red Dragon Fantasy; Song Lyrics and Poetry”. He immediately started working on adding new scenes in, An Angel’s Whisper as well as Illustrations. The original short story was about 30 pages and the novella stretched the story to about 99 pages. He fleshed out seven or eight characters that were not in the short story and added more action in the scenes. The short story has the duration of about six months where the novella expands on four days. The concept that came from An Angel’s Whisper the novella was from both An Angel’s Voice and An Angel’s Whisper. The two short stories are a pair that were written specifically to be together. In the short story, An Angel’s Voice, Rya is writing An Angel’s Whisper for a girl who suffered a broken heart from her ex-boyfriend and can never love again. Rya attempts to change that by writing the story An Angel’s Whisper for her. She reads his book and immediately falls for him. The short story follows the earlier sequels “An Angel Visit” , “An Angel Visit II; The Act of Temptation” and “An Angel Visit III; Heaven” and each of the short stories were written from his experiences of visits in the past. When it came time to write the novella, Johnson wanted it to be more of a gun fight story or end of the world type of book that was a thriller. The novella became more of a Christian - Fantasy -Thriller.

     When publishing The Culminate Amethyst, Johnson decided to add illustrations and keep the front cover that he illustrated in 2002. The book became more of a 12th Anniversary for The King’s Retribution.  Red Dragon Fantasy; Song Lyrics and Poetry was published in 2019 with the other two books as a collection of compositions that were written from 1992 to 1995. While he was in junior high and part of high school he wrote a mix of compositions that were mirrors of what was going on around him. He attempted a few times to start a band but was unsuccessful and he decided, after high school graduation, to gear more towards writing short stories and novels. He continues to write poetry and song lyrics.

The Legacy Anthology