My story is a little different than most writers. I didn’t have any formal training in writing. In fact, I barely made it out of high school. I didn’t read my first book until I was almost 30-years-old. Reading seemed like a chore when I was a kid. It wasn’t until after I married my beautiful wife in 2009 that I began to notice I had a knack for writing. This was from writing thank you cards to hundreds of guests who attended our wedding. I just did what felt right and found out later that most of the cards I wrote brought the people to tears (the happy kind, I hope). Fast forward a few years to when I was the best man in my best friends wedding, as well as for my brother at his, and I really revved up the writing engine. I wrote an 8 page speech for both of them and brought the house down with laughter. I felt invincible when I stood in front of the crowd and read my speech.
As fun as all that was, I didn’t call myself, or think of myself as a “writer” until my wife, Kelsey, was 6 months pregnant with our son. I felt that if I was ever going to try something new, I better do it before the baby arrives. However, it wasn’t novels that I wrote, it was comedy screenplays.
The experience from writing my first screenplay was tremendous. I was very much excited and I felt as if I unleashed a secret power inside myself that had been dying to come out my whole life. Unfortunately, I quickly came to the realization that Hollywood wasn’t going to come knocking on my door because I wrote a screenplay. Although I lost some of my enthusiasm, I continued to write scripts. After a couple years passed I had completed three feature comedy scripts, as well as several comedy television pilots and web-series’. But the same issue hung around; no one was knocking at my door for them.
Living in North Carolina made it difficult to get my work read, so I began entering as many contests as I could find. And I did well in them, but I felt that unless I were to drop everything and move to NYC or Hollywood, leaving my family and day job behind, I wasn’t going to have any success. I wasn’t even going to have any readers! So I took a break for about a year. During this time, I had a horrible back injury that planted my butt in bed for close to a year. At the time I never thought this way, but now looking back, it was the best thing that ever happened to me because I decided to try writing a book. I called it ‘When a Flower Burns’.
Not only was going from screenplay writing to book writing a big change, but I also jumped from quirky buddy comedies to romance fiction! All I can say is when something feels right, it’s right. And I have never looked back!