How It Began

When I was five years old, I would ask my grandmother to read a picture dictionary to me. Every time she would get to the “writer” entry, my gaze would always linger a tad bit longer. What was it about the picture that fascinated me? The disheveled looking guy in a robe? The antiquated typewriter? The coffee cups, obviously empty? Or was it the papers lying all around him, crumpled on the floor? Maybe it was his fingers flying frantically over the keys (or so I imagined). Or maybe, just maybe, what attracted me most were the things that I saw as I rested my hand on his tired shoulder, stood on my tip-toes, and dared to peek at the half-written page. Things like joy, and pain, and the way the wind turns a leaf just before it falls. And people, such people . . .

Whatever it was, it obviously stuck. Because most likely at two a.m. that’s where you’ll find me—sitting at my laptop, wearing an old ratty robe I really should throw away, but can’t . . . just because we’ve been through so many words together. We’ve obsessed about the color of the light over old Jerusalem. We've wandered through the British Museum by candlelight, searching for Bianca's soul mate. We've studied the pattern of the rain on a window, just before he said the unthinkable and ripped her world apart.

So here I am, giving you a window into the oddities of one particular novelist. I hope you enjoy this journey, come along beside me, and we'll find our way together. And in those still, magic hours just before the sun breathes deep, I'll lift one of my tea cups—one of the many scattered around—and I'll be thinking of you, my readers, and how I can’t wait to share my imaginary world with you all.