A Man of Honor, or Horatio’s Confessions is my debut novel, winner of two silver medals (Best First Book, Fiction & Best Cover, Fiction) awarded by the Independent Book Publishers Association (2020), 2020 Notable Indie, Top 100 \—Best Indie Book Awards, Shelf Unbound, Finalist, Literary Fiction in the 14th Annual National Indie Excellence Awards (2020), rated 4.4 out of 5 stars by IndieReader Reviews, and 4 stars by Clarion . I took the pen name J. A. Nelson. My given name is Jennifer (Jen) Nelson. I am the founder of Quill Point Press. I live with my husband and pets in Northern Virginia. I grew-up in Culver City, a suburb of Los Angeles, California. My childhood home stood a few blocks away from MGM Studios, Culver Studios, and Desilu Studios. I blamed her abysmal math grades on periodic late arrival at school: streets often were blocked by the studios’ camera and film crews. Math issues aside, the creative forces in the coastal breezes inspired me. Reading and writing were my “bag.” My earliest gum-scraping bite at the apple of success was the feedback I received from an executive reader at 20th Century Fox about a double-length script that my best friend and I had written and submitted for the t.v. show M*A*S*H. This is great! Better than many of our episodes of the last two years. Wish you’d sent this sooner. We just wrapped the final season and are in post-production. Sooner? Not likely. We were 15 years old at the time. However, that bite of apple hid some nourishing seeds. For me, it was the encouragement and joy of conceiving and writing something big, complex and fun. The idea for my debut novel, A Man of Honor, or Horatio’s Confessions, came as I watched the film Hamlet, by Kenneth Branagh. The prompting question came not in battalions but as a single spy: What is Horatio thinking? While in the midst of a two-decade career at the National Archives of the United States, I filled my evening and weekend hours, sometimes in the company of my husband but too often (as any honest author will confess) writing and submerged in research, in this case: about the Shakespeare play, the legend of Hamlet, and every detail about life in medieval Denmark and France. As I wrote A Man of Honor, or Horatio’s Confessions under the pen name J.A. Nelson and in 2019 founded my publication imprint, Quill Point Press, I fed my passion for learning about literature and history. Yes, yes…degrees in cultural studies (BA, Occidental College and MA, The George Washington University) undergirded my research, but travel across Europe was my inspiration. Visits to specific locations in Denmark and France that are depicted in my book. Ancient marketplace towns. Churches and temples. Fields and monuments. Museums. Taverns. Palaces and castles. Collections in libraries and archives. Hardly least, the people. Innocent souls, wandering through my line-of-sight, had no idea they were modeling or being “copied and pasted” to populate a writer’s fictional scenes. I am writing my next novel in the same home in Northern Virginia, married to the same patient gentleman who is not surprised that another book is in the works.