Christopher Laney

Christopher Laney is a novelist, pilot, and lifelong believer that some of our most important moments begin when we stop long enough to question where we’re headed.

His novel Flying Colors explores that idea through the story of John Freeman, a man who has spent years building the life he thought he wanted—until a strange encounter leads him to Air Haven, a grass airfield forgotten by the modern world. There, an old flight instructor named Kent draws John back to his childhood love of flying and to the everyday magic he stopped noticing somewhere along the way. Kent’s lessons have nothing to do with airplanes, yet each one lands, and Air Haven itself begins to show John things he can’t explain.

Over one remarkable summer, John must decide what he’s willing to leave behind—and willing to believe—to make room for the part of himself he thought he’d outgrown.

The themes in Flying Colors grew from Chris’s intense curiosity about how life works and his fascination with possibilities, connections, and hidden paths that may remain unseen until we’re willing to look for them.

Chris knows John Freeman’s world from the inside. He has built and led multimillion-dollar firms and worked with some of the world’s largest companies. He still leads Zenergy Technologies, a software consulting firm he co-founded, giving him firsthand insight into the ambition at the heart of John’s story—and the questions that can arise when the life we’ve worked so hard to build no longer feels like the only one possible.

The writing came first, though.

Chris was first published at age nine, when a story he wrote won a county-wide writing contest and appeared in a local newspaper. He later received the Thad Stem Scholarship for the Arts for writing and spent years writing magazine articles before turning to fiction. He now pays that craft forward through The Write Motivation, a class that helps aspiring writers stop thinking about their ideas and start bringing them to life.

Then there’s flying. As a pilot, Chris has always been drawn to flight—not only for the freedom of being suspended in air, but for everything it represents: possibility, perspective, adventure, and the courage to leave familiar ground. As a former collegiate diver, he’s spent most of his life leaving solid ground one way or another.

Those same ideas run through his fiction and his Dare to Soar essays, where he explores the questions we ask, the choices we make, and the moments that can quietly change the course of a life.