Metro Roundup: From sergeant to storyteller
Every morning, Stu Jones wakes up an hour early to drink his coffee and spend time writing before he heads to his job as a sergeant with the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office Drug Enforcement Task Force.
“I try to get some words in,” Jones said. “I try to take these little bites out of my project day by day. It may just be 300 words I get down, but eventually those 300 words make a book.”
To his credit, Jones has already written and co-authored seven books, his latest released in April.
He began using writing as a creative outlet in the early 2000s. Always with a creative side, Jones said that as a child he enjoyed drawing and telling stories with his drawings. During high school and college, he used his creative expression to make short films.
After college, Jones said he was at a crossroads. He almost went to film school because he was driven by a need to create, but he “didn’t want to be stuck for the rest of my life making commercials for someone else.”
He leaned into the other side of his personality, which needed to see justice served first hand, and decided to go into law enforcement instead. In 2004, he took a test for the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office in the Chelsea High School cafeteria along with 400 other candidates, and he was hired for one of four positions.
He began writing not long after as a way for him to process the things he saw on a daily basis — “the terrible, the worst of human nature,” he said.
“Writing was like a necessary creative outlet, but also personally to process what I had been dealing with, like horrific car crashes and abused kids, that before I hadn’t been exposed to on that level,” he said.
Jones has served in patrol, narcotics and criminal investigations, as well as being an instructor of firearms and police defensive tactics and as leader of a multijurisdictional SWAT team. He is trained and qualified as a law enforcement SWAT sniper, along with hostage rescue and high-risk entry tactics. He also spent three years with the U.S. Marshals Regional Fugitive Task Force.
His first three books, the “Action of Purpose” trilogy, are a post-apocalyptic, faith-based series that explores the depths of human depravity. Jones said as a Christian, he felt that much of Christian fiction did not reflect his faith experiences, and he wanted to contrast the ugliness of the world with the light at the end of the tunnel.
In 2011, he began a friendship with Dr. Gareth Worthington, a British writer living in Switzerland. The two met via Goodreads and thought each other's books sounded interesting. Worthington holds a degree in marine biology, a Ph.D. in endocrinology and an executive MBA, as well as being board certified in medical affairs and working in the pharmaceutical industry educating doctors on new cancer therapies. He is also an atheist.
The two began a friendship and stayed in contact over the years. When Worthington had an idea for a book about a collision of two worlds, he asked Jones to co-author it. “It Takes Death to Reach a Star” went on to win eight awards, and the duo have now written three books together, which Jones describes as near-future techno thrillers.
“We’re very different people, and what's crazy is that our friendship and writing partnership should not work,” Jones said. “With him being an atheist and me being a Christian and our different ideas and philosophies, the world would tell you we shouldn't even be friends. ‘Genesis of a Star’ is our coming together as friends and co-authors, and it mirrors the journey of the protagonists in the story. It looks for similarities instead of what divides us and is a story of tolerance.”
Jones and his family lived in Chelsea from 2005 until last year, when they moved to north Shelby County near Caldwell Mill Road. His children attend Westminster School at Oak Mountain.
Once he retires from the Sheriff’s Office in the future, he plans to jump into writing full time. For now, he has two more solo books on the way, and he and Worthington are working on their fourth book together.
While Jones’ books have found an audience and he has had success, he said that writing is a journey for him.
”It's a locomotive, and you've got to keep it on the track,” he said. “It's a constant grind.”
For more about his books, visit stujonesfiction.com.