Meet Rich
Rich Shapero’s novels dare readers with giant metaphors, magnificent obsessions and potent ideas. His casts of idealistic lovers, laboring miners, and rebellious artists all rate ideas as paramount, more important than life itself. They traverse wild landscapes and visionary realms, imagining gods who in turn imagine them. Like the seekers themselves, readers grapple with revealing truths about human potential.
All of his titles—The Hornet’s Spell, Hibiscus Mask, Beneath Caaqi’s Wings, Dreams of Delphine, The Slide That Buried Rightful, Dissolve, Island Fruit Remedy, Balcony of Fog, Rin, Tongue and Dorner, Arms from the Sea, The Hope We Seek, Too Far and Wild Animus—are available in hardcover and as ebooks. They are also available in multimedia format, combining music, visual art, animation and video in the TooFar Media app. Shapero spins provocative stories for the eyes, ears, and imagination.
A Double Life
“When I graduated from college, I was penniless,” Rich reflects. “Like many people with creative aspirations, there was an unreconcilable gap between what I wanted to do and what the necessities of survival required me to do.”
He got involved in the computer industry to fund his writing habit. His first job in tech lasted five years, and he earned enough to quit and write for seven. Then it was back into tech, beavering away in the stolen hours. “A number of my heroes had to work for a living, so I figured that wouldn’t be so bad. Well, the stolen hours turned into stolen years.”
“I had great conviction, but I had no help, and I asked for none, so I spent years stumbling around in the dark.”
Rich worked on a number of projects during this time, including Wild Animus, The Hope We Seek, Arms from the Sea, and The Slide That Buried Rightful. “I had great conviction, but I had no help, and I asked for none, so I spent years stumbling around in the dark.” There were moments of the blackest despair. “What I wanted, I wanted very badly.”
He did well in the computer industry. Ultimately, he was president of two high-tech startups, and partner in a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. “The more demanding the job, the worse my life became. I would get up at four in the morning, write for four hours, drive to work, bust my guts, crash and wake up at 4 a.m. again. If the bubble hadn’t burst in 2000, I’d be in the graveyard. I hung up my tech spurs and focused on my very first project, Wild Animus.”