“People say, ‘Who do you think you are, Indiana Jones?’” John Mylroie joked with the Friends of the Starkville Public Library during its Books and Authors program on Thursday afternoon. “And you know what I tell them? ‘Indiana Jones thinks he’s me.’”

Mylroie is a retired Mississippi State University professor of geology who traveled all over the world, writing about 285 papers on cave systems until he retired in 2014. After retirement, he said he spent several years working with NASA to categorize cave systems in space, until he decided to take up fiction writing, publishing six novels in the last year.

“I was working with people from NASA and the jet propulsion laboratories of other universities on how to find and categorize caves and other bodies in the solar system,” Mylroie said. “Planets, moons, asteroids and comets. And so, I sort of wrapped up that work, and I thought, what am I going to do next? What sort of adolescent dreams are still there?”

In 2019 at 71 years old, Mylroie said he picked up fiction with a “why not” attitude. In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Mylroie had even more time for his new passion. He said he wrote so intensely he wore down the keys on his keyboard, writing 22 manuscripts for books between 2019 and 2022.

Mylroie’s writing spans the genres of spy thriller, science fiction, fantasy and an apocalypse book. Eight of his books include cave systems and geologists, as his experience in the field lends itself to the subject. But once Mylroie started self-publishing his work, the writing slowed down.

“Publishing is much harder work than writing,” Mylroie said. “I wrote three chapters of my 23rd book in early January of this year and I haven’t done anything since. Your creative juices get sidelined in trying to go through the manual labor and that’s really painful.”

Since November 2022, Mylroie has self-published “The 12th Girl,” “No Night as Dark,” “False Flag True Colors,” The Impractical Philosopher” and “Carbon Die Oxide” in the David Langwonaire thriller series featuring a professor of geology in the deep South who becomes a CIA and FBI resource. Mylroie has also published “So Says the Sword,” a fantasy novel.

While Mylroie is self-publishing his work, he said he does not do so on his own. He works remotely with a content editor and publishing editor who help to prepare his work for publication, sometimes adding thousands of words to his works based on their suggestions.

Following this editorial process, he displayed photos of the cover design process, including various suggested stages for the cover of “No Night as Dark.” Originally, Mylroie said, he used a photo he took of a cave to design the cover before his publishing editor took over.

Mylroie said he and his editors are currently working on two more books to be published before the end of the year. First, his apocalypse novel, “Discriminator,” which he wrote in 16 days in early 2020 before the pandemic escalated, will be published this weekend.

“When I got done with the apocalypse novel, I thought, oh boy, this is quite a reach,” Mylroie said. “Society could not break down like this. And then we were in the COVID restrictions and people were fighting over toilet paper in the stores and a woman got shot because she asked someone to put a mask on, and I thought, maybe it’s plausible.”

Following “Discriminator,” another book in the David Langwonaire series is also slated for release before the end of the year. Mylroie said he plans on publishing his manuscripts as quickly as possible due to his age.

“I didn’t want to leave those (Microsoft) Word documents on my computer unpublished,” Mylroie said. “What the hell would my heirs do with them? No, seriously, what would they do with them? … The reason I stopped creative writing… is that I need to get these books out.”

Phillip Carter, director of the Starkville-Oktibbeha County Public Library System, said the library hosts Books and Author events for the Friends like Thursday’s to give the “entire community” the chance to come together around reading.

“They are opportunities for us to gather as friends and neighbors to express shared joy in the written word, and that does more good for our community that can be measured,” Carter said in an email.

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