Hi. I’m Robison Wells, and I’m the New York Times bestselling author of a whole bunch of things.

You might know me from my breakout hit, VARIANT, a dystopian YA novel that debuted in 2011, or you might know me from THE WARNING, the hit bestseller that I co-wrote with James Patterson, or you might know me from my early days, writing a hodge podge of genres for the LDS market including ON SECOND THOUGHT, my first and only rom-com.

Alternately, you might know me from the fact that my brain doesn’t work very well. I have schizophrenia, and I fell ill with schizophrenia (and anxiety disorder, depression, and OCD) during the same time I was hitting it big with my VARIANT series, so the whole thing was kinda public. I’ve never (mostly never) tried to hide the fact that I have been sick, and in the time since my diagnoses I have spent nearly as much time speaking to groups about my mental illness as I have speaking to them about my books. And I’ve contributed to two anthologies related to mental illness: LIFE INSIDE MY MIND and ALTERED PERCEPTIONS.

Who Is Robison Wells?

I am from Salt Lake City, Utah, and I have lived along the Wasatch Front (the mountain range that runs north to south past Ogden, Provo, and Salt Lake City) the majority of my life, except for a few years I lived in the Four Corners area, which I’ll talk more about below because it seems to pop into every single one of my books.

Rob Wells in School:

• I went to West High School in Salt Lake City, where I was a fairly poor student most of the time. I was a “gifted student” so I was in a program where instead of going to junior high I just spent six years in high school. I think back on it as formative, certainly, but I wouldn’t put my own kids through it.

• I did an associates degree at Salt Lake Community College, something I cannot recommend enough. It was such a good school and the perfect transition from high school to university. The classes were small and less-demanding, and the tuition was dirt cheap. I started in the architecture program there, but then had a massive change in priorities when 9/11 happened, and I switched my classes to history and political science. I ended up with an Associates in General Studies.

• I moved to the University of Utah, where I got a BS degree in Political Science/International Relations, with an emphasis in the Middle East, and I minored in history. Unlike so many of my fellow poli-sci students, I didn’t have plans to go into law—my intention was to go into a masters program for Security Studies and work in intelligence. That didn’t happen because while I was working at the U of U, I got my first book published. And, despite the fact that this was with a small press, I thought I had it made in the shade and that I was going to be a big famous author. So I didn’t pursue a master’s program.

• Until I did, and I got an MBA in Marketing from Brigham Young University. I absolutely loved being in this program, particularly I loved being challenged by being around so many smart people all the time. Business school is different from other grad programs (like law, for example) because grades matter very little and the program exists solely to get you a good job. Half of your classes are how to network, how to act professionally and ethically, how to write a resume, etc. And the other half of your classes are very challenging things like advance finance and statistics. I adored my time in this program. However, I graduated in 2009 at the height of the Great Recession and was unemployed for almost a year.

Rob Wells in Writing:

How I Got Into Writing

I had never wanted to be a writer. In school, I did not like English—either writing or reading. This was the direct opposite of my brother, the inestimable Dan Wells (an amazing writer of the I Am Not a Serial Killer books, as well as currently working as VP of Narrative for Dragonsteel, Brandon Sanderson’s company.)

Dan wanted to be an author from the second grade on, and he would always drag me to the library with him. That is one thing that makes me very grateful for my gifted program at West High School: we would take the city bus across Salt Lake and we’d end up at the main SLC library at least twice a week, if not more often. I was still not a writer by a long shot, but I did develop a love for a certain kind of books: those about miniature wargames and model railroads. There was one book on wargaming that I checked out and renewed so often that it might have well just been my book.

Anyway, this is how everything progressed until I got to college. I remember taking a history class where we talked about the Battle of Stalingrad. (If you’re not familiar with the battle, it was the bloodiest in all of World War II, fought between the Soviets and the Germans and it was so dangerous to be out in the open that, in a few instances, troops would tunnel underground from basement to basement to advance.) I thought this was too good of an idea to give up on.

So I went to my brother and said “Here is this idea for a book—you should write it.” And he, being more seasoned in writer who heard these kinds of things all the time, said “Why don’t you write a couple of chapters and come down to my writing group and read it?” That writing group had five people, including one Brandon Sanderson. And yes, I fell in love with writing, but was terrible at it. But I learned quickly and at the end of the year I had one completely terrible fantasy novel.

How I First Got Published:

At that point I felt like I had learned a ton, but I had never meant to write fantasy—I was mainly doing it because Dan and Brandon were writing fantasy (the other two guys in the group didn’t bring stuff very often, but when they did it was fantasy.) So I decided to take the only advice of “Write what you know” to heart—perhaps too much to heart—and wrote a book based on my experiences living in New Mexico.

This is what spawned On Second Thought, which was, to put it kindly, fan fiction. Fifty Shades of Grey may have been a rip off of Twilight, but On Second Thought was a blatant fanfic of Baptists At Our Barbecue: city boy ends up in a small town in New Mexico in a fish-out-of-water romantic comedy where he meets the love of his life and solves a mystery. Don’t get me wrong: I really like this book. It’s just fan fiction.

And thus begins the part of my story where other authors hate me. I picked a publisher almost at random (the book on my wife’s nightstand was from Covenant Communications), so I printed out the manuscript and mailed the thing to them. And they accepted it. Yep, I was never rejected. First try.

Of course, it was a small press. And my editor later told me that it wasn’t written as well as they would have wanted but it was a bit of luck and timing: the week before they had an editorial meeting where they said they were looking for comedies. So they accepted mine, even with weak writing, because it was funny.

But don’t worry: I’ll continue to infuriate you later on.

I published two more books with them. (I should point out that Covenant Communications is an LDS publisher—I’m LDS—so while the books were not in the realm of inspirational fiction, they also talked a lot about church topics. So just know that going in.

The two following books were a weird genre that was the comedy mystery. They weren’t action comedies. They were like comedy thrillers. They were weird. And I didn’t know what to do with them and neither did my publisher, but they liked them and did their best. Please note that the first one, Wake Me When It’s Over, has a horrifyingly bad cover because the marketing department was just plum out of ideas. Also note that The Counterfeit, which is its sequel, never mentions Wake Me anywhere on or in the book because that cover made the book sell so poorly that the publisher was trying to distance themselves completely from it.

How I Broke Into the National Market:

Like I said, way up high in this article which is getting too long, I went to grad school to get an MBA and graduated during the Great Recession unable to find work. Things were rough. My wife and I had cashed in all of our savings and put everything into returning to grad school and when no one was offering work in 2009, I ended up moving me and my small family back into my parents’ house.

Everyday I would go to my dad’s office and spend the first half of the day applying for any and every job, and then I’d write for the second half of the day. I had no plan for what I was supposed to be writing. I kind of puttered around with several different projects, but was generally too stressed to focus. I was getting depressed and it was starting to show.

Fortunately, my brother, who was published by this point, made me an offer. He said that he would take me to the World Fantasy Convention—pay my way—and introduce me to all the agents and editors he knew. The only catch is that I would need to have a book to pitch: either science fiction or fantasy. Aside from that very first, very terrible book, I had never written either.

Oh, and also I had to have this book complete in two months.

Well, I don’t know how I did it, but eleven days later I had the first draft of Variant. I have never written so quickly and so well. I’ve never been able to replicate this. But I did it.

I went to the World Fantasy Convention in October(?) of 2009 in San Jose and pitched to everyone. And it went horribly and I came home with a single business card.

BUT. Meanwhile, Dan had told his agent, the inimitable Sara Crowe, about me, and she’d said I could pitch to her. I did so and she signed me on right away. She had one round of revisions, and then the book went on submission.

The submission process took three rounds. The first time it was sent out the feedback was all universally “we hate the ending”, so Sara and I rewrote that. The next round was all editors saying they REALLY liked it but it wasn’t quite there. So more revisions. Fortunately, one of those editors, Erica Sussman, had told Sara that if I made revisions she would be willing to give it a second look. She did, and—holy crap—I got a three book deal with Harper Collins.

The Harper Collins Years

My time with Harper was amazing. Erica was, and continues to be, a phenomenal editor and person. I did Variant with them and then its sequel, Feedback.

It needs to be said that this deal was made in 2010 and I was 100% riding the coattails of the Hunger Games, and I knew it. It was when YA dystopian hit big, and while Variant is not technically dystopian, I was frequently lumped in with that. I always refer to my books as “modern day, real world, with a science fiction twist”. And that pretty much sums up my Harper Books.

No, there is no third book in the Variant series. I don’t think it needs one. What I DO think it needs is about four more chapters. But unless there’s some reprint/director’s cut kind of thing, I don’t imagine that will ever happen.

I then moved to Blackout, Dead Zone, and Going Dark (a novella in the same universe). These books were spawned from two things: my political science degree—I was going to get something out of that SO HELP ME—and I’d also been playing for years with the idea of really weak super powers.

Anyway, because Blackout was the third book in my Harper contract, and it needed a sequel, my contract was extended by two additional books: Dead Zone and Dark Energy.

Dark Energy is maybe my favorite and my least favorite of my Harper books. I think it’s the funniest of the books, which I like quite a bit, but I also think that the I didn’t stick the landing. It’s definitely the book of mine that I read most often and think—”hey! I wrote that!” So that’s cool.

Mental Illness and The Dark Years

So, after I had written Variant, but while I was working on the sequel, Feedback, I started to get panic attacks. It wasn’t the first time—the first time had been while I was working 90 hour weeks at my MBA internship. But they were becoming debilitating and I didn’t understand them. And they started to get weird. They turned into what we thought was OCD with lots and lots of disturbing thoughts.

What I didn’t know then and wouldn’t know for another six years, is that I have schizophrenia. I see things that aren’t there and believe things that aren’t true. And it has been a mess. I also have an anxiety disorder and very severe depression.

The main reason that my career with Harper ended was 1) because the YA dystopian craze had run its course, and 2) I was incredibly hard to work with. I missed deadlines. I showed up to events so incredibly medicated that I was worthless. I went to a book festival in Paris, paid for entirely by my French publisher, and I remember next to nothing about the trip except that I was kicked out of Notre Dame because I had fallen asleep and they thought I was a vagrant.

During this time I contributed to two mental health anthologies: Altered Perceptions and Life Inside My Mind.

But here is also where my agent Sara earned her money. (Or, rather, where she earned my loyalty, because she wasn’t earning much money from this.) She knew that I was too sick to be traditionally creative and write my own stuff, so she started to find me work-for-hire work, basically ghostwriting. I can’t talk about which books I worked on but there were two major YA series in the 2014-2017 range that I ghost wrote a handful of books for. This is why when I say I’ve written 15 novels, my Books page doesn’t show 15 books.

The one book that I did manage to write for myself did not land with a traditional publisher, which I thought was really too bad because I loved it: Airships of Camelot. But it’s super weird and of course no publisher picked it up: it’s dieselpunk King Arthur wild west pandemic. I ended up self-publishing this book through a kickstarter campaign.

It was also during this period that Sara landed me the big deal: I got to co-write a novel, The Warning, with James Patterson. At the time I wrote with him (I don’t know if this is still true) he was the biggest selling author in the world. And it’s in no small part due to the fact that he co-writes so many books. (The trivia I heard at the time—2018—was that one in every seventeen books sold in the entire world were James Patterson books. I don’t have a source for that, but it could very well be true.)

Anyway, that was my book to hit the New York Times Bestseller list, where it lasted for five weeks.

Semi-Retirement and Wargaming

In September of 2019, during the weeks that The Warning was on the NYTimes list, I got a fulltime job with an online marketing agency. I will tell you this one thing right now: I have lived life as a fulltime writer—I did it for seven years—and no amount of freedom-of-being-your-own-boss beats having a steady income and health insurance. I cannot imagine a circumstance where I would ever go back to writing fulltime, unless I was making somewhere in the tens of millions of dollars. The market is just too fickle and money is always a stress.

Anyway, in my day job I was writing content for other companies’ websites: web copy and blogs and white papers and that kind of thing. And I got to thinking: if I know how to do SEO research and write effective web copy, why don’t I start my own website? So I did.

I started The Wargame Explorer, a website about one of my oldest loves, miniature wargaming. I ran that thing for four years, writing more than 600 articles for it. At its peak it was bringing in 150,000 pageviews per month and earning me a good side income.

I wrote my first wargame, The Dirty Half Dozen, and published it there under Wargame Explorer Studios. It’s currently mentioned on this site, but I haven’t figured out how to download it—I wrote it to be given out for free.

Unfortunately, due to the fickleness of Google, after four years of good times my website folded. Almost overnight, thanks to a Google algorithm update, I lost 95% of my traffic. And the site was big enough that I couldn’t justify continuing to pay the hosting costs. So it’s no longer online.

But other than that, I just haven’t been able to bring myself to write anything creative for the last five and a half years. I finished my last manuscript shortly before starting this current job, and it didn’t sell and I didn’t want to self-publish it. (Not because I have anything against self-pub but because I didn’t think the book was all that good.)

Current State of Things

So two things happened in my mental health. February of 2019 I started a new drug regimen for schizophrenia that has been nothing short of a miracle. I have not had, as of Oct 2024, ANY hallucination or delusion since 2019. Which is pretty phenomenal.

What I have had, however, is severe and debilitating depression. It got bad about three years ago and it has been a slog. I essentially go to bed every afternoon at 3:00pm and I’m there until I go to sleep. It sucks a lot. The only way I’m able to do anything creative—like the drawings and miniature painting you see on this site—are because I wake up at 4:30am everyday. My brain works in the early morning but it doesn’t work in the afternoon. I’m currently writing this at 7:15am.

However, a recent and amazing change—this is only six weeks old—is my psychiatrist tried a new couple of meds (well, one new med, and one timing change because he thinks I’m metabolizing my medicine too quickly). Anyway, the gist of this is that it bought me about 2.5 to 3 hours of good brain time in the afternoon. I still go to bed at 3:00pm, but now I can take my laptop or a notebook.

And I might be working on a book???

The Whitney Awards

As mentioned, I started writing in the LDS publishing market. If you’re not familiar with it, you’ve probably heard of Christian fiction: basically books about romance/mystery/historical/etc that also have a religious tie-in. The LDS market was very small at the time, with only five notable publishers—and only three that had any clout—LDS fiction kinda didn’t have a great reputation among general audiences.

For example, when I got published with Covenant Communications—the second largest at the time—people would get excited by the news I was pubbed and then when they found out who it was with, their face would fall and they’d offer a weak “well, this is a good jumping-off point”. After a while, I started to get really sick of this.

Now this was in the early 2000s, and my first idea was that what LDS fiction needed was a Rotten Tomatoes kind of critical repository: if we could show the public what critics and reviewers were saying (this was before Goodreads existed) then that would not only prove to readers that the books were good but also spur writers to write better books. So I started something called the Mormon Fiction Review Database (or something like that). I would scrape the internet, manually looking at blogs trying to find reviews of LDS fiction books, and I’d load them into the very rudimentary HTML website.

But it didn’t work. Didn’t get any traction, didn’t make any difference.

Then one day during the Storymakers Conference I was having dinner with Brandon Sanderson and Dan Wells (my brother). I was expressing these thoughts to them but, as much as I love them and they love me, they also shared the thought that LDS fiction was generally poor quality. We talked a lot about how this could be fixed and we talked about how the SF/F genres also get hate. But then Brandon mentioned the Hugo Awards.

And that got me thinking: we don’t need to highlight all the criticism of LDS fiction: we need to highlight the good stuff, because there was a LOT of good stuff. That’s the thing—LDS fiction as a whole wasn’t bad, it just had a poor reputation. I believed at the time, and have been proven right, that the best LDS fiction is as good as anything being published nationally.

I immediately got the idea for an awards program. I went back to the conference and started gathering support, first telling the inestimable Julie Wright and Annette Lyon. They hopped on board and I started the process of building the awards program, under the umbrella of Storymakers.

Well, it has grown a ton since that day. I started it in 2007, with the first awards presented in 2008. I got it off the ground and served as president from 2007 to 2010, after which I bowed out and let other people take the reins.

And it has flourished! I started the program with five awards, plus two overall awards, and now there are 12 awards with 3 overall awards. I’m no longer involved at all, other than being in a chat group with all the current and former presidents where we discuss rules changes, but this has been one part of my legacy I’m most proud of.