Servicemembers come from all walks of life. As such, their hobbies can vary greatly. Some like to work on motorcycles or cars, others like to compete in marathons or skydive. And some, like Chief Warrant Officer 3 Arthur Mills, Jr., like to write stories.

Mills, who is stationed on Joint Base Lewis-McChord and works in the I Corps G-2, has been writing since he was a child.

When he was in third-grade, his teacher asked the class to write a sequel to Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

"I just kept writing and writing," recalled Mills, who has served on active-duty for more than 20 years. "The teacher read it and loved it, and at that point it was like, ‘I think this is what I want to do. I want to be a writer.'"

The married father of two, who lives in Lacey, recently released his third self-published book.  Entitled The Haves and the Have Nots, the 80-page novella is a fable set in Olympia's Tolmie State Park.

The story

Life is good for the chipmunks at Tolmie. They have comfortable burrows, plenty of nuts to eat, and good friends in animals like the owls and ants.

But one summer day, a flock of blue jays joins the forest family. Instead of foraging for their own food, the jays resort to pillaging the chipmunks' burrows and stealing the food they have been saving for winter.

Revolution is in the air. The chipmunks are soon on the outs, the jays take over and a "great war" ensues. Many of the animals leave or die, and after a few years the forest itself begins to wither. It is only when the chipmunks return after several years that hope, and the forest, is restored.

The story behind the story

Like Mills' other stories, The Have and the Have Nots can be interpreted in more than one way.

"I like to have the reader decide which way it goes," he said. "I want the individual to come up with what it's really about."

The message Mills, a political conservative, wants to relate with The Haves and the Have Nots is that things in America will get better economically and socially.

"America was the best country in the world when it was considered a conservative style country," he said. "As the 1960s and 1970s rolled on, and when things started becoming more liberal, especially now that we have a very liberal president, things have really gone downhill. What I'm trying to portray is that things are really bad now, but in the future, if we were able to get another conservative president, like at the end of this book, things will get better."

Sickness

Mills' road to penning the story, which he wrote in just six weeks, was not without some obstacles.

In 2011, he deployed to Afghanistan with I Corps, and he soon began to feel numb in his arms and legs. He started to get headaches.

"I would just get very disoriented, and everything would spin," he remembered.

He was sent to Germany, where he stayed for a few weeks. Further testing couldn't determine the cause of the condition, and Mills returned to JBLM.  

Two years later, his symptoms persist, but doctors don't know why.  His condition has been labeled "acephalgic migraine," which is essentially a migraine without the headache.

"They never found anything wrong with my brain," Mills said. " It comes and goes, but still when I type I can't feel the keyboard. And when my elbows are bent to any extent, my whole arm goes numb. So any type of typing starts off as painful and then becomes numb."

When he returned from Germany, Mills thought his military career was over, and, he said, "definitely my writing career was over."

Storytelling

A few months later, however, Mills realized he could use the voice recognition software Dragon Naturally Speaking to do the typing for him.  

"It was very weird," he said of using the software initially. "I just looked at the screen and started talking. There was a lag time, and it would show. But I was too much into editing it, and it was too distracting. So what I ended up doing was turning my chair away from the screen and speaking normally."

Mills believes that using the software has made him a better storyteller.

"I think I'm a better storyteller than I am at writing," he said. "I just tell the story, and I turn around and it's there, written for me. It reads more like a story than a book, and I think that's what readers like."

Mills' other books are The Empty Lot Next Door, published in 2010, and The Crawl Space, published in 2012. For more information visit thehavesandhavenots.com or www.branching plotbooks.com. The Haves and the Have Nots is available for purchase on Amazon.com and www.bn.com.