I wrote my first novel at the age of 10. Not surprisingly, it was short. It was printed by hand on lined school paper, mimeographed (I forget the size of the print run), and hand-cut into pages about 4 or 5 inches square. The cover was made of purple construction paper, and the pages were hole-punched and tied with yellow yarn. The book was about a 10-year- old boy’s visit to a tribe in the Amazon rain forest. I eventually got an M.A. in anthropology . . .
but I never wrote another novel. Until 2017, when I published three in one year. I’m not quite sure how that happened. I didn’t set out to be a novelist. I don’t even read fiction, as a rule. But I kept getting ideas—and after a long career in the drier aspects of publishing, I was more than ready to explore my creative side.
I started Adventures of a Wannabe Hippie about 15 years ago, but I didn’t get serious about it until late 2015. It is not an autobiography, but I wanted to convey the flavor of the ’60s and ’70s, the sense of openness and creativity. I remember how excited I was when people started naming their businesses things like “Cool Rides” instead of “Bob’s Bike Store,” and in the cities you could find wildly interesting treasures like wooden Scandinavian Christmas carousels and Japanese tea sets instead of the (literal) nuts and bolts in our hometown stores. I wasn’t much for the hippie scene, and it certainly had its downside, but I took advantage of the cultural openness of the time to explore new spiritual avenues.
The second and third books have different goals. Making a Difference is probably the most practical, and Birthright 2061 the most thought-provoking. I saw all three books as challenges in conveying spiritual concepts that are generally only explored in nonfiction.
In the end, I found myself thoroughly enjoying the process of writing novels, which may be how I wound up writing so many of them. I have always had a very visual imagination and a sense of theater, which helps in creating lively characters and interesting scenes. And I do think of them as scenes, not chapters. Rather quaint, but that’s how it works for me.
Fiction continues to amaze me. In so few pages, so few words, a different world is created. You walk into it, look around, shake hands with the people you meet, sit and listen to their musings, wonder with them, love with them, grieve with them, learn with them. I could only watch and listen and go on the journey as it unfolded.
A little boy I know said, in response to his mother naming the authors of the books she was reading to him, “God writes all the books.” So that’s the explanation.