Article: Classified ads inspire author's fantasy novel

Who knows where your next good idea might come from? Mark Forman got his in the classified ads.

It was 2000, and Forman had just been laid off from his job as a systems administrator, so he was looking for a new position.

As he pored over the classified ads day after day, "I got annoyed with reading the same old ads over and over. I thought, wouldn't it be neat to see an ad for a job that's not normal? What if you wanted someone to go slay a dragon, and you advertised for it in the classifieds?"

That's where his idea for "Slathbog's Gold," a young-adult novel recently released by Shadow Mountain, came from.

Forman -- who grew up in Bountiful and, after serving a mission for The Church of ...

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