J. Don Wright, known as Jackie to his friends, has lived many different lives.
For 23 years, he was in the Air Force and lived all over, including Alaska. He then spent 10 years working for Emergency Management, spending long hours on the road, traveling to Texas, Cimarron, Beaver, and many more other counties. He then became Professor Wright, teaching a course that he developed to train state Emergency Management employees at Rose State College.
And now, he’s a writer. Wright, a retiree from Carney, recently published his seventh book. “The Everyman Virus,” which he joked was not prompted by COVID. It’s the first book that he co-wrote, using a concept from his son Johnathan. It centers on Dr. Victor Equerry, an experienced virologist who’s been contracted to the CDC to create a serum that will render all humanity immune to viral infection and disease. However, his facility is raided by the FBI, whom Equerry believes are foreign agents at first, leading him to take the serum himself rather than hand it over.
Wright said all of his books are essentially about good versus evil, with good triumphing. He writes paranormal/sci-fi books with a religious bend. He was drawn to sci-fi as it was a genre he read since childhood. When he was 11, his family lived in Taiwan where his father was stationed. Wright said one of the boys he gravitated to there as a friend was a huge sci-fi nut. He’d borrow them, but it wasn’t enough, so eventually he started gong to the library.
“I found Heinlein and Asimov and Clark, and started reading the classics,” he said. However, even though he now has seven books out, when Wright started writing, he never intended to publish.
“I wrote for the sheer pleasure of writing and then, even more so, as bizarre as this may seem, for the joy of editing,” he said. “Most writers hate editing. I enjoy going back and reading through the story again as I’m looking for punctuation errors, syntax errors, the way the sentence structure can sound better.”
The first novel Wright ever wrote - “Coug” - he started in 1978 and finished in 2012. He still hasn’t published it, but is considering it soon. Books came a bit easier to write after that with his first published book “Behold,” he wrote in three weeks.
“Once I had the story in my head, it just came out,” he said.
Wright attributes his jump in to publishing in part to Betsy Kulakowski.
She worked at the Department of Labor and came to the first beta testing of his emergency management course. The two discovered that they both enjoyed writing and exchanged work. They ended up editing their works together. Kulakowski then got a six-book contract and began publishing the “Veritas Codex” and later encouraged him to try and get published as well.
Now, seven books later, Wright has no plans of stopping and is currently working on a two-book project that he hopes to publish together.
The Lincoln County Museum of Pioneer History is hosting a book signing event for “The Everyman Virus” on Aug. 3 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.