In the second grade, Miles Ballard wrote his first play, which his father typed up on goldenrod paper he cadged from the university where he taught. When the little girl he had a crush on wanted to rewrite the play with him, Ballard agreed, with reservations. It was the last time he ever collaborated on an artistic endeavor with anyone.

 

Many years later, he confessed to the great Harry Crews that he had begun a number of novels and short stories, but had never completed them because he always discovered their fatal flaws. Harry told him he had lost all respect for him for that. Since then, Ballard has finished everything he has started. If one discovers piles of abandoned paintings, novels, and songs in his collection, that just means that they are simply marinating. Surely he will get back to them some day.

 

Ballard taught writing at James Madison University for two years and at the University of Florida for nine. When he realized that year-to-year contracts were causing him unsustainable anxiety, he pivoted to the world of software, where he has been ever since.

 

A bulk consumer of thriller novels, history, music history, underground comics, and literary theory, he became obsessed with writing a thriller himself. In a life that has never enjoyed perfect closure, he was enamoured of the world of the thriller where every cannon brought on stage must be fired and every villain vanquished. Neck Deep is his first novel.