Shane Scollins
Official Website of Best Selling Author
Shane Scollins is an Amazon best selling author with 10 full length titles and several short stories to his credit. He enjoys taking his readers on surprising and unexpected journeys into the supernatural.
The Early Years -
Shane was born in northern New Jersey. As a kid he spent most of his time playing sports with his friends and riding his BMX bike around the hills of Hopatcong, NJ. The majority of his summer days were spent on one of the many baseball fields around town, or playing street hockey on East Madison Trail with the neighborhood kids. The winters were spent looking for good ice for a hockey game on Lake Hopatcong, or one of the many small ponds that dotted the hilly landscapes.
The High School Years -
After moving across county lines his freshman year to Landing, NJ, Shane left his friends in Hopatcong to attend Roxbury High School, where as the new kid, he sometimes struggled to stay out of trouble. Earning poor grades and getting into fights was not exactly the way to amass an exemplary high school record. As time went by he managed to get through it and graduate on time. But it was in his English/creative writing class that his talents were first noticed. Though he'd always been writing as a way to tell stories, he'd never had anyone tell him that this might be something he should consider as a career. That is until a certain English teacher suggested that he develop the raw talent for story telling, with which he'd clearly been born. Of course, being a less than willing student, Shane shrugged off every attempt by this teacher to get him to submit anything to the creative writing newsletter every year. However, he continued to write and tell stories if only for himself and the entertainment of his friends.
The Searching Years -
After graduating high school, Shane worked a lot of different jobs, played guitar and sang lead vocals for various bands, attended various schools and eventually earned a degree in computer science. But none of it was what he wanted to do with his life. He could not help but notice the one consistent strand in his life had always been writing. Time and time again, Shane would find himself writing either fiction or spending his spare time doing freelance writing gigs.
A few years prior, Shane's mother had given him a Dean Koontz book titled STRANGE HIGHWAYS. It had unleashed a reading spree that saw Shane read virtually every Koontz book he could find. Koontz had done something no other writer before had done. Koontz wasn't boring or predictable, he wasn't long-winded or pedantic. He made Shane realize that reading books didn't have to be something only hardcore readers did, that everyone could enjoy books if they were presented in the proper way.
So that is what Shane set out to do. He set out to develop a style of writing that was not traditional in every sense. He wanted to create stories that even non-readers could enjoy. Stories that moved fast, that held attention, that kept the reader flipping pages because they just didn't know what might happen next. He didn't want to follow every traditional pattern or formula of prose. He wanted to open up in others, what Dean Koontz had opened in him, a love for reading.
For the first time he set out to write, with the idea of becoming a published novelist. He spun out story after story into novel after novel at breakneck pace, honing his skills and learning what he needed to do. Then after seven solid stories, he threw them all away...all of them.
It wasn't until 2009 when he felt like he had a story worthy of being published, and that story eventually became his Amazon best seller and critically acclaimed romantic thriller LEGACY RISING which was first published in 2011 under the title THE SWEET SIXTEENTH.
The Current Years -
After spending a decade in the cold and snow of upstate New York, Shane moved down to the beaches of Wilmington, NC. After taking a hiatus from writing for nearly two years, he's back and ready to spin out some new tales for his fans and new fans to enjoy. After all, telling stories is what he's always done best and there is a never ending well of ideas from which to pull...