For my first blog post, I thought I would share what finally motivated me to put the pen to paper, or in my case, bang my fingers on the keyboard and finally write my first book.

It was February 15th, 2015, the day after my mother died from colon cancer. I was struggling with the grieving process of bargaining, anger, etc. I had witnessed a strong woman fight a great battle while always maintaining a smile when the family came to visit her. She hid the pain, the struggle, and the fear from all of us so well.

I was lucky to have been able to be with her during her last couple of days in our world. It is an anchor in my mind whenever challenges come up. It puts many of my fears into perspective and I can then move on. We chatted about so many things. One of her statements that stuck in my head, was: “I still feel like I just graduated from high school. Where did the time go? There are so many things I still want to do.”

She encouraged me to attend college and supported my decision when I switched my major from Pre-Med to Film/Screenwriting. The rest of my family thought I was insane, even telling me I would not make a good starving artist. My mother, though, was always supportive. When I became discouraged she was the one who reminded me of the various stories I talked about while growing up which went back as far back as elementary school. During the clear hot summer nights in Northern California, I would sleep on the picnic table in our backyard with my dog, Zoe. I would stare for hours at the stars wondering what incredible wonders existed out there. The nights when I could see the Milky Way Galaxy clearly were mind-blowing.

So, here I was grieving my mother’s death and I kept hearing her voice ask me, ‘What was I waiting for. What was holding me back from putting my stories down on paper?’

FEAR. Just plain old fear was what was holding me back from actually writing the story beyond just an outline. If I wrote it out, rather than outline it, I would be committed to that story in a solid format and it would no longer be in a fluid state. Then, the story could and would be judged by others. That was what was holding me back. I have so many different stories in my head that I can talk for hours about them. The story. The characters. The main plot. The subplots. Even the details in the next couple of books in the series and how they all tied together.

So, I looked at the list of stories I outlined over the years and selected the one which I had originally written as a screenplay but wanted to write as a novel. During film school, one of my professors always said, ‘Write what you know’. So, I selected a story in which I knew the most about the setting around the story which was when I worked at an old grocery store in San Francisco. The screenplay was titled “Nightcrew”, but by the time I finished the novel, five years after my mother’s death, I retitled it “Gate of Torment” and published it in February 2020. It was a mentally freeing journey which I can share more details in the future.