I began writing my first novel in 1997, the year my wife and I moved from Houston, Texas to Nashville, Tennessee. I have wanted to be a published writer since the first grade, evidenced by the blank next to the question What Do You Want to be When You Grow Up? in my elementary school progress book, in which my six year-old little hand scrawled the word “author.” Throughout adolescence I was a prolific writer, churning out short stories and school newspaper articles and lessons for my church youth group and the like. My dream all along was to write a novel like the ones I enjoyed so much as a kid, and in my dreamy imagination I knew I could work some idiosyncratic literary alchemy with proportionate parts C.S. Lewis and Stephen King. The conditions seemed right in ’97. I had a few months free before resuming studies at a university in our new state. Having left the comfortable familiarity of our hometown struck the right creative chords too. So—pouring decades of ambition, years of mental composition, and months of between-homes angst onto the page—I eventually produced my first full-length work of fiction, a supernatural thriller titled OTHERWORLD. Things…

Aloha from the 50th state and the land of a thousand rainbows. Have you ever read a book with not only a terrific storyline, but where the setting of the novel comes to vibrant life and becomes a character in its own right? Maybe you’ve read about different locales and dreamed of traveling there. But short of time travel or culture hopping, you may never be able to personally experience an 1864 Civil War battlefield or dystopian sci-fi adventure. But these worlds are to book lovers as easy to access as picking up our e-readers or the latest paperback. Because the best novels transport readers to a vivid place and time, becoming almost a character in and of themselves. Some of my favorites include: Mitford in the Jan Karon novels; and the world of Narnia created by C.S. Lewis. Creating captivating settings is half the fun for me. Last year, I reunited with a college friend, who shared with me how she’d located her birth father in Hawaii and how a wonderful, new chapter in her life had opened. Through a difficult personal journey, she and her family had come full circle. And that very day, the seed of ALOHA…