Terry Conrad

I am a 33 year old Middle School Guidance Counselor who likes to write on the side. I live just outside of Atlanta, GA with my wife Dawn and my dog Simba. I grew up in Cleveland, OH in a Baptist home and went on to college at Palm Beach Atlantic College (now a University) in West Palm Beach, FL where I earned my Bachelor's Degree in Religion with a concentration in Psychology in '95. I went on to Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and received my Master's Degree in Counseling in '98.
After meeting my wife just a few weeks after 9/11, we moved to Atlanta where I began working at the charter school I am currently employed by in the fall of 2002.
As a pre-teen I used to read a lot of Hardy Boys novels and began writing for the first time in the 5th grade. They were short stories, about 40 pages each and non-stop action from start to finish. Over the years I had always wanted to write books and seemingly had a neverending flow of book ideas pop into my head, but I never got much farther than the pre-planning of the book before giving up, believing I couldn't follow through.
Recently, two of my best college friends have been getting their works published and have been doing quite well and they along with my sister (who has been taking classes and has started writing screenplays) have encouraged me to get back into writing.
I started my first official book last September (2006) and finished my first draft just before Christmas. My friend Jay Waitkus (who was a writer for the Palm Beach Post and has published two novels himself) has finished editing it and now I am currently rewriting it - shaping it to make it better.
I hope that through this forum I will be able to receive some constructive feedback on my work, and be able to get others to read and maybe even buy my work. I realize that I may not be the most talented author out there - I'm no Dean Koontz or James Patterson, my two favorite authors - but I hope that I will still be able to capture the attention of a few suspense novel readers.
My first book, which I have tentitively entitled, "Illusion of Grandeur", is about a detective investigating the disappearance of a young teenage girl. He finds that she has joined a cult, but also finds that the cult she has joined is involved in multiple Doomsday plots to bring about the end of the world as we know it. Hopefully, I will be finished rewriting it this summer and will be published shortly after that.
In addition to that book, I started writing a second book (while the first one was being edited) which I have for now entitled, "Fugue". It would be considered a psychological thriller/suspense novel and so far I am about 3/4 of the way through that book (and will focus on that one once I am finished with the first).