I’ll never forget the moment I received a publishing offer from Pandamoon—it will forever rank up there with days like my wedding and when I was accepted into law school. But the Pandamoon offer was certainly unique in that I associate it with another, far worse moment of my life.
A little background: I wrote my first piece of fiction in high school and fell in love with the craft. And while I had always wanted to write a novel, I kept pushing that desire away as I was waiting for the “perfect” story idea. Also, there too many other, more “pressing” matters at various points of my life: college, law school, work, etc.
That all changed in the fall of 2012 when I was involved in a pretty serious car accident. Without getting into the nitty-gritty details, I recall standing in the middle of the wreckage chaos, and a single thought blasted my mind: It all could have ended here.
For several months, I could not shake that thought. It seeped into my waking and sleeping hours. What if it would have ended on that street? What regrets would I have left on the pavement?
I eventually decided that the only way I could “move on” was to harness that event into something creative. A few months later, while driving in rural Oregon, I came up with the idea for a story involving a man being chased by his biggest regrets down an endless road. I posed the idea to Yasmin—my then-girlfriend now-wife—and she liked it. And that idea became the basis for my novel FATE’S PAST. Just a little reminder that light pierces brightest in places without it.
That’s my story. What’s yours?