This is my spiritual journey through life, my way of making sense of the world. I don't need permission from anyone or accolades from anyone; it is completely internal.

I loved to read and to write, but then something happened. As I made my way through school, I kept getting handed books to read that didn't excite me and didn't even remotely connect to the realities of my life.

I loved the world of imagination.

That's the whole point of writing to me - I put my characters under incredible duress, and from that comes their truth. In a way, I'm using them to try to find my own answers in life.

How many people long for that "past, simpler, and better world," I wonder, without ever recognizing the truth that perhaps it was they who were simpler and better, and not the world about them?

All of his life had been filled with crashing ends to promising beginnings.