Author Rival Gates

I was born in Port Huron, Michigan USA and moved to a suburb of Toronto, ON, Canada at age five.  My father was a technical writer and magazine editor while my mother was a high school teacher.  Always interested in creative writing, I participated in many contests in grammar school which led me to start writing my own short stories.  At age thirteen I began working on one, which kept developing and progressing until I had a hand-written manuscript for “Quest for the Red Sapphire” at age fifteen.  The project was shelved for many years through high school and then returning to the USA to attend Michigan State University.  I graduated with a degree in Communication and found that I had a gift and enthusiasm for speaking in public.  That led me to a career in furniture store management and sales.  With my first PC I dusted off my old story and began to revise it.  Not a day had passed since I first created the story that I did not consider some aspect of its outline.  An entire series was planned and put in order to be written.   Backstories were formed and the series was ready to produce.  After years of refinement of the stories, my mother came to me with a terminal illness and made me promise to publish the books.  So I did just that.