Kevin Lynn Helmick

Kevin Lynn Helmick

Kevin Lynn Helmick, the author who would go on to pen such works as The Lost Creek Journal, Clovis Point and Sebastian Cross was born in December, 1963, in Fort Madison IA, a few months after Kennedy was assassinated and a few months before the Beatles landed in America.

Growing up seven years younger than the youngest of four brothers his views of the world were largely shaped by 60’s and 70’s pop culture; Elvis Presley, James Bond, Andy Warhol, comic books and of course the music of The Beatles, Bob Dylan and The Doors.

Around the age of ten he began writing poetry, song lyrics and developing characters. Some of those characters would appear later in completed short stories. In his early teens, he was reading Mark Twain, S.E. Hinton, J D Salinger, Earnest Hemingway, and F Scott Fitzgerald and became aware of his desire to someday write his own Catcher in The Rye or The Outsiders.

In High School he took all the reading and writing classes available and continued to polish the craft of writing. He also expressed his creativity and talent in fine art; photography, painting, pen and ink sketching. Over the next ten years he worked as a carpenter and continued to write and submit small pieces, short stories and poetry in his spare time.

After a few publishing credits, some slight notoriety, a couple of small awards he put the writing aside in the mid 90’s and focused on a career as General Contractor. With the economic collapse of the real estate market in 2008, he found himself back at the desk and revisiting an old dream.

In the winter of 2009, he put together a collection of selected writings and poetry that accumulated over the last thirty years and titled it after a place he often played as a child, The Lost Creek Journal. It was a project started and put aside on a number of occasions and finishing was his only writing intention at the time.

But the writing bug had bit again and later that summer he began work on his first novel, Clovis Point, published April, 2010. Intended to be a fictional, biographical, coming of age story, it quickly took on a life of its own and became a modern thriller. A 19 year old part time ranch hand in northwest Nevada finds himself in a life and death struggle with a destiny he can’t begin to understand.

While waiting on rejections and brushing up on the classics, an idea began to form for the saga that would be Sebastian Cross. On the surface it’s the story of an intrepid, world traveling writer who produces a masterpiece that sets in motion a chain reaction of suicides, vigilante justice, and assassinations around the world. But under the surface it’s a novel of the shifting of a world culture, the death of literature, the decline of conceptual and intellectual art at the beginning of the computer age. It’s a novel about an author who has written the right book at the wrong time and the repercussions of that creation threaten to destroy him and everyone around him.

Sebastian Cross is a high concept adventure novel that has received five star reviews from readers and other well known authors.

Helmick now lives in the Chain of Lakes region, north of Chicago IL. He’s currently writing his third novel, the story of a failed, Hollywood screenwriter who’s forced to return home to a small Midwestern river town and reassess who he is, where he came from and what’s important to him.

Known for gritty dialogue, accomplished, fast paced prose and complex themes, Kevin Lynn Helmick challenges the reader with moral subjects of race, prejudice, organized religion and political correctness. His work is said to defy genre and classification. It stands alone as original and thought provoking.