David Taylor: you may not know the name yet, but you may someday. Mr. Taylor is a local author who has written and published ten novels and is putting the finishing touches on number eleven. His latest book is the middle story of his science fiction trilogy A Tale of Four Planets and is titled The Rejected Counsel of Oomb. Sessions with the Seer is the title of the first novel of the trilogy, and you can find both titles on Amazon. Mr. Taylor is a local resident who grew up not far from Beltsville in the Wheaton/Silver Spring area and has lived in Beltsville for the last fourteen years. He received his undergraduate degree in English literature and his Master's Degree in Cross-Cultural Education at Ohio University. After college, he taught remedial English at Catholic University in Ponce Puerto Rico for two years. It was there he met his wife. He followed that up by spending a year helping the Berlitz School with an experimental program to teach English to police officers and firefighters from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and a couple of years teaching English and speech communication at Prince George’s Community College. He then taught English as a second language for Montgomery County Public Schools for 28 years. According to Mr. Taylor, writing has always been a passion. In his words, “I have felt a commitment or calling to storytelling since before I can remember; my mom claimed that, when I was only two years old, I would insist on sitting her down to spin some yarns for her!” Much of his early writing imitated authors and stories he loved. He is a huge fan of Jules Verne, comic books, and television shows such as Star Trek and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. When he was a teenager, he wrote novels based on these television shows and even sent one of his stories for U.N.C.L.E to the show’s executive producer, Norman Felton. Mr. Taylor said, “it was a big thrill to receive an encouraging letter from him!” College was the time that Mr. Taylor began exploring the creation of entirely original material. Mr. Taylor has done a lot for children in his years as an educator and a writer. His work with children “inspired the creation of some picture books to help them learn English. They featured such characters as Boo-Boo Banana, Happy Apple, Poo-Poo Potato, and King Carrot. My favorite of those was Superbanana, a ninety-page picture book epic! Superbanana could leap over a tall flower in a single bound, run faster than a speeding bug, and bend a blade of grass with his bare hands. But his real superpower was bringing out the best in other people!” When talking about his novels, Mr. Taylor highlighted Contact with Gaia, a book he wrote and published in 2003, as having a special place in his heart. According to him, “It was heavily inspired by my work with children from all over the world and was the first novel I was able to get published in its entirety.” When asked about his favorite, he replied: “the trilogy I am completing, A Tale of Four Planets, is my hands down favorite because I believe it is, by far, my best-written, most consequential work.” We began this piece discussing Mr. Taylor’s most recent novel, and I asked him to tell me a little about it and the trilogy itself. The Rejected Counsel of Oomb is the second book in the trilogy. Both novels deal with the first contact with an alien race. The main human characters are a Puerto Rican Family from Philadelphia. On the website goodreads, reviewer Elizabeth Brown said that the first book, Sessions of the Seer, was “one of the most original and well-crafted novels I’ve read in a long time! I was completely drawn in from the get-go.” You can check out both novels in the series on Amazon now.