They say lighting never strikes twice. As a group of creatives who grew up in the lighting capital of the USA, we can attest that lightning strikes when and where it pleases. Just like inspiration.

The inspiration for Lightning Struck Media & Publishing began way back in the ancient, halcyon days of the early 1980s, with a bunch of kinetic, creative little kids stuck on a ranch with nothing to entertain them after the chores were done but their imaginations. My brother and I, along with a rotating cast of relatives, friends, and neighbors ranged far and wide, gallivanting over thousands of acres of pasture, grove, and woodland.

We trekked down mysterious game trails, clung to rope swings to ford forest streams without getting our boots wet, rode horses and go karts and ATVs. Occasionally, we also chased down errant horses, cows, donkeys, or goats that had escaped their paddocks and gone on walkabout. Looking back now, I’m not entirely certain our parents didn’t leave those gates open on purpose just to give us something to do.

Not that every aspect of our childhoods sounds torn from the pages of Twain. We also grew up surrounded by and immersed in some of the best SciFi & Fantasy stories ever made. We were absolutely spoiled by timeless tales of adventure and heroism, of the pursuit of utopia and the perils of dystopia. Even some of the sillier entries produced characters who still capture imaginations today. We saw Star Wars, Willow, Conan, Highlander, Excalibur, and The Neverending Story in theaters. Transformers, Robotech, He-Man, Voltron, and Thundercats on TV. Discovered Dragonlance, Tolkien, Wheel of Time, Pratchett, Redwall, Williams, Cleary, and King at Waldenbooks in the mall… and, if we were lucky, found some dog-eared copies half-price at the used paperback shop in town. Some of us were lucky enough to be invited to delve into Dungeons and face the fury of Dragons… Satanic Panic be damned.

We explored those wide, wild green spaces with heads full of these stories, so it’s natural that we would find a place of our own to bring those stories to life. That place, for us, was the Deadfall Tree. Just a few long paces from the barbed wire that separated our land from the hunting woods, the Deadfall Tree was, for us, a portal to imagination.

The Deadfall Tree

To most of the adults who saw it, the Deadfall Tree was an eyesore. A broken chunk of a long-dead tree that, sometime in the past—nobody seemed to know, exactly—had been struck by lightning and left to lie, blistered and forgotten by people and by time. Until we came along.

In our minds, the Deadfall Tree was a wonder: Split by a surge of unfathomable power from the heavens, charred by fire, and baked hard in the unforgiving Florida sun. Get up close, place your hand flat on that black trunk, and we could feel it, the kinetic buzz of that long-ago bolt from the blue. Climb up on that trunk, and it was transformed… us too.

In our limitless imaginations, fed by master storytellers and marketing gurus, that lightning struck tree became our playground. Sitting up high on the forked end, we were Han and Luke pew-pewing away at Tie Fighters before blasting off into hyperspace. The lower fork was the bridge of the Enterprise or the deck of a privateer vessel under the command of a fearsome Caribbean buccaneer. Dancing along the trunk wielding switches pulled from nearly weeds, we had legendary duels with swords and lightsabers. We battled the minions of Cobra and Skeletor and all manner of orcs, goblins, and other nefarious evil.

We thought those moments would last forever…

They didn’t… Time passed. Life moved on. We held onto some of those precious memories, even as, one-by-one, we all moved away, went out into the world and build our own lives. Property changed hands, and the Deadfall Tree was lost to time. Years ago, I took my kids back there, hoping to introduce them to that lightning struck gateway into adventure. We met the new owners. Nice folks. I asked him if the old Deadfall Tree was still out back. “What old tree?” he asked, puzzled. It was gone. Vanished, like a portal to Narnia, once opened, is lost forever.

I didn’t blame him. How could I? He had never soared through space straddling those old forked branches or stood up on the blasted roots, an indomitable corsair sailing the high seas to fortune and glory… He had never charged off the wide trunk, racing toward an implacable enemy with his best friends at his side, or leapt off the high point to fly up past the second star to the right… To that guy, the Deadfall was just an old tree in the way of his wife’s ambition of a hydroponic container garden. Where did the tree go? He probably mulched it.

Fast forward to a few years ago…

When the group of us who would become Lightning Struck Media & Publishing came together to decide how we would tell the story of who we are and what we’re all about. We talked about being a group of creators who not only told good stories, created good art, and invited people to play in our worlds… We wanted to share what we have learned over years producing, improving, marketing, and selling stories and other ideas… We decided to invite people to come alongside us, to help them make their ideas the best they can be, and position them in the market in a way that will bring their target audience to them.

Like the Lightning Struck tree that inspired our name, we would be a source of inspiration, a kinetic cauldron of ideas where stories of all kinds and shapes and sizes flourish. We hope that you love our stories enough to share them… and we are excited to hear yours.