Who Is Peter Pike?

Peter Pike was born June 22, 1978 in Fairbanks, Alaska.  He moved to Colorado when he was two years old, and has been there ever since.

An avid reader from a young age (he and his siblings often won the summer reading contests at their local libraries), Peter fell in love with the English language.  As a pre-teen, he would write short stories to his aunt.  Despite their poor quality, she always loved them.

In junior high, Peter added music to his interests when he gained the desire to play the saxaphone.  Alas, there were too many saxaphone players in his school band, and he never got the opportunity to play that instrument.  Instead he learned trumpet and later French horn.  During high school, he was first chair trumpet at his school.  The band director also doubled as the Drama Club supervisor, and in his sophomore year Peter joined and found that he enjoyed acting as well.

As a junior, he was named Thespian of the Year for his school after performing the role of Andrew Carnes in the play Oklahoma!  As a senior, he played Uncle Max in The Sound of Music.  As a result of these experiences, he has never since enjoyed a Rogers & Hammerstein musical.

Also as a senior, Peter won the John Philip Sousa Award in band, and went on to pen a short story that was read aloud in his English class (after that reading, a classmate asked the teacher: "Why can't we read stories like that in our literature book?" to which the teacher responded, "I think one day you will.").  Finally, Peter arranged several themes from various movie soundtracks, including The Last of the Mohicans and Braveheart, an arrangement that was performed at his high school graduation, where he had the honor of directing the band.

Given all this, Peter took the logical step of going to college as a Computer Science major.  Yeah, we don't know what the hell he was thinking either.

During this prodigal time, however, Peter remained creative.  He learned guitar and co-founded a punk band with two others, which later morphed into a techno/punk one-man-band after the other members dropped out (one became a teacher, the other a Marine). He also managed to publish a poem in the literary magazine riverrun.  He converted the short story that was read aloud in his senior English class into a full length novel.  When that was finished, he worked on two more novels, before finally advancing enough in his craft that he thought it was worth trying to get a novel published.

He chose for this task a novel entitled The Outlaw, which he published as a print-on-demand novel.  He has since disowned it for the simple reason that "it's not very good."  He is currently working on a re-write of the novel.

More successfully, Peter published Public Transit, which has so far sold enough copies to buy him a cup of coffee.  In his mind, that makes it worthwhile.

Because he has disowned the first version of The Outlaw, Peter considers Public Transit to be his first "real" novel.  He is unconcerned if historians disagree.

Peter continues to work on novels.  His style is somewhat minimalistic and serves well for action.  Peter says that he "writes fast and edits slow" which means that he often blisters through a first draft of a novel before spending years editing it.  For example, the first draft of Public Transit took a mere two weeks to write in 2004.  Peter then edited it for three years before publishing it in 2007.

In addition to writing novels, Peter also works on several short stories every year and many musical pieces, and in 2009 he began writing, directing, and scoring animations using characters created by Xtranormal. 

No matter what he works on, Peter always works with the same motto: If you write for no reason you have no reason to write.