We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Joshua Loyd Fox a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Joshua Loyd, appreciate you joining us today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

I believe the saying, “Anything worth doing takes risk” is a mantra for life. My life and faith require that if I want to get to the very top, and achieve my utmost potential, I have to take the leap, without knowing where I would come down.

I did this in December of 2022. I had been working part time towards my dreams of being both a bestselling author, but also to start up and succeed at building my publishing company, and my platform online of video blogs, a master class, and giving motivation, hope, and inspiration to many others.

I was pushed with the fact that my day job kept me so busy that I had only worked a few hours a day, when I woke up before dawn, towards my dreams. What could I do, I asked myself, if I focused on the dream full-time? So, I took the leap. I retired from a very lucrative and successful career in the Defense Sector, and I took to the road with almost no resources to see what would happen.

That started the hardest part of an already hard life. I was thrown into a fire that I had no idea how it would turn out. But taking the risk is ALWAYS better than living with the regret of never having given it a shot at all.

If you want to be separate from the masses, you have to do things that no one else is willing to do. And that means giving up a guaranteed security, throw caution to the wind, and allow something greater to bring you down in a higher place than where you gave up. It’s scary, and that’s what separates the men from the boys.

Take the risk. You’ll one day look back in full-on regret if you don’t.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

My name is Joshua Loyd Fox. I was a double orphan at the age of eight. I am a product of the group home system. I am a wounded veteran, having served three tours of duty in the Middle East. I am a father of seven children. I am retired from the Dept. of Defense after a twenty-five-year career.

Four years ago, I decided to leave an abusive, toxic situation, and heal both my childhood trauma, and what had been done to me, and overcoming the bad decisions of my adult life. During that period of healing and storm-tossed loss, I decided to become everything I had ever dreamed of becoming.

I had always wanted to write. I had written articles for my college newspaper but had never really finished anything. So, broken, hurting, but on the road to recovery, I sat down to start writing my own story. I was 40 years old.

Three and a half years later, I have written five full, published novels. My autobiography, and the first four books of my dark urban fantasy series, The ArchAngel Missions. I am currently deep into book five of the series, and my sixth novel. I have written several companion short stories to the Missions, available on Amazon Vella. I have written and am about to publish an anthology of my poetry, called, “I Don’t Write Poetry.”

I have created over 100 video blogs giving everything from “Fatherly Advice Today” to Christian Messages for the Modern Day. And I have developed my own master class series, available on my website, titled “Mastering the Journey with Joshua Loyd Fox.” My entire body of work, and everything that I have been able to achieve, including my first national book tour at Barnes and Noble, as well as becoming an Amazon Best Selling Author is available on multiple platforms that can be discovered on my Link Tree site. Just google Joshua Loyd Fox.

And in that time, God gave me a plan so bold, so daring, that I cannot in anyway take credit for it. During my time publishing and writing and formatting, and editing my novels, I developed through trial and error and tons of research, a whole new skill set. A marketable one. So, I have created my own imprint, Watertower Hill Publishing, LLC. With it, are plans for a brick-and-mortar bookstore, The Brass Fox Bookstore. As well as a 501C exempt foundation to help children like I was. Runaways, orphans, foster kids, and the hungry. It is called The Watertower Hill Foundation.

My books, poems, short stories, master class, video blogs, tweets, videos, social media posts, and interviews/appearances can all be found and discovered on Google under my name, or on my website, www.joshualoydfox.com

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I have so many stories here to pick from, but one in particular stands out strong. Let me start off by saying that in every way, no matter your pursuit in life, giving up cannot be an option. It’s literally the only guarantee that you will NOT achieve your goals.

Here is the story of my own fight against giving up and throwing in the towel.

I had been getting up at 4am every single day for three years to write before working my day job. I had been working out at the gym four or five days a week. I had created a billionaire mindset, that started each day with my morning routine. In three years, I had accomplished more than most people will ever do in their lives. And it was still not getting me the outward success and solid ground I had been praying for and working towards at all. Online I looked successful and motivating. In my own life, I was still alone and isolated, I was almost dirt poor, I had no car, was barely treading water financially, and a small wind from any direction could strand me, homeless and poor, at any moment. I had zero safety net. Except my faith and dogged determination that no one could ever say I didn’t do absolutely everything I could do, every single day. 24/7/365.

I mumbled this mantra under my breath daily, “confront the dragon, get the gold.”

And then everything went belly up. Following my heart and faith, I took a leap of faith and DID finally end up homeless, destitute, and needing other people’s help for the first time in my adult life. I learned to humble myself and ask for help. I was begging for money just to survive. One more meal. Ten more bucks in the gas tank to get through the winter night sleeping in my car. One more long walk to write, print out plans, do the work.

But I never gave up the dream. I went into Starbucks for their free Wi-Fi every day and wrote. During the time I was homeless, I finished a novel, wrote more than I had ever written in a short time before, put together my first master class, and made the full plans and financial needs for my publishing company as well as the other dreams that God had placed in my heart.

I learned strength that I never knew I had. Resiliency that came from deep within. And right when I was about to quit because nothing was happening, a miracle happened at the very end of my rope.

Don’t ever give up. Even if you are on the brink of collapse, the exhaustion burning your eyes, your joints screaming, and no sleep can be found, don’t give up.

When the storm has you nearly perished, the mountain looks insurmountable, the run is too hard, and you have nothing left, don’t give up.

The ones who push through the pain, who keep going despite how everything looks in the natural, and with grit in their teeth, spit in their eye, the wind at their face, and their bones aching to give in, that’s when the universe will conspire to break you through, and you’ll be paid back for every hard day, hour and second.

Don’t give up. Don’t give up. Don’t give up.

Nothing worth doing is going to be easy. Expect to take it on the chin until you can’t stand up anymore. Tuck your chin and keep punching. Confront the Dragon, Get the gold.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

While there are so many good questions asked here, the one above about resiliency and this one, where I’m going to talk about developing a deep self-respect and a thick skin, stand out to me as things I wish I had heard early on. It would have saved me a ton of pain.

When you step outside of your life to become something greater than whatever you’ve done before, you have to understand and expect to lose people who had had you in that little box that made THEM comfortable. When you start to change everything about your life to pursue your dreams and start putting your heart and soul into your creative venue, the people who you assumed would support you fully and completely are usually the ones who don’t support you at all.

That fact hurt me to my core.

I lost literally every person close to me when my books and this life I’ve developed for my dreams started growing. Family, friends, close loved ones. No-one read my books, even when I dedicated a book to them. And that fact made me start to develop boundaries and block those who did not support or encourage my dreams. I became egotistical to some. I became someone I wasn’t to others. And the real truth was, THEY did not like the boundaries I had had to create to keep moving forward despite the pain they were creating in me. One family member literally told me to my face that I wasn’t (Steve Harvey or Oprah, or many others I emulated) and that I was a fool, a stupid fool, for quitting my day job.

And that’s when the losing of people I loved due to lack of support, became the growth of my haters.

Goodness….I had never been hated so much in all of my life! They wrote bad book reviews. They worked to tarnish my reputation online. They created whole websites aimed at discrediting everything I was trying to do. Bitter people I had walked away from because of their own toxicity then turned it around and tried to prove to the world that I was a monster.

One particular group of haters, the group my real people lovingly refer to as “The Fan Club,” went above and beyond in every hateful way, on social media, to make me look like someone I wasn’t. They pretended to be me, creating social media profiles with my name, my business name, and anything remotely looking like me, and then used those platforms to spew hate against the very people my platform was using to promote. It was ugly, and it hurt in ways I couldn’t imagine.

But I persevered. I developed thick skin. Strength of character. And I never stopped being fully who I was, or what I was working so very hard on achieving. My platform grew, while theirs did not.

I had to press internet bullying and stalking charges twice, but in the end, my work, and my real fan base grew despite the haters.

And that’s pretty universal when you are putting good into the world. The masses will see what you are all about, and what the haters are trying to do. It will work out in your favor if you develop that strong inner core of who you are, what you are called to do, and know that you are never going to please everyone. Let the people go who don’t support. Ignore the haters as much as you can. And just keep doing what you started doing anyway. Youll come to find that the haters actually succeed in promoting you forward faster than if you had no haters at all. That’s the magic with doing good, and pushing through the pain, hurt, and loss.

Just be yourself despite the haters and the non-supporters. And your tribe, your new people, your fans, they will all be there for you when you need them the most, despite the hate and evil behavior of the few.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.joshualoydfox.com
• Instagram: @jlfoxbooks
• Facebook: facebook.com/jlfoxauthor
• Linkedin: Joshua Loyd Fox
• Twitter: twitter.com/JLFox_Author
• Youtube: youtube.com/channel/joshualoydfox
• Other: linktr.ee/jlfox