Everything Has An Origin.

It’s one thing to have stories bouncing around in your head, it’s another to be able to transfer them to a piece of paper. Or a document, as it were. I had always struggled with the patience required to do so.

To be honest, I still do.

However, in some cases the story is just too good to keep rattling around in your head like an overactive pinball.

As far as origins go, up until about six years ago, I’d been doing pretty dang well at keeping all the stories in my head where I believed they belonged.

And then I moved to Africa.

And started taking mefloquine, which apparently has the side effect of extremely vivid dreams/nightmares.

Now, I could go into fairly immense detail regarding what it feels like to wake up in the middle of a tropical night to find that the power’s been turned off, your fan stopped fanning, and you’re lying in a pond of your own sweat that was drawn out in equal parts by a stifling heat and the terror that seized your subconscious. Quite frankly, though, you can just read the previous sentence and deduce the rest by yourself.

I’ve always been blessed (cursed?) with vivid dreams, but malaria medication took those and turned them up to eleven. And they’ve never turned back off. For the many months that I lived in Africa, I was having more and more dreams, and I came to realize that they were all part of the same chronology, forming a kind of splintered storyline. It also changed gradually from something that made me dread closing my eyes to a kind of private theatre, wherein the main character was me, and the main event was, “let’s see how I die tonight.” I was becoming more aware that they were, in fact, dreams, and a sort of intense curiosity developed, which made those nightmares comedic in a macabre sort of way.

Think of it as groundhog day, but far, far more in-depth.

Even once I moved back to the states, the dreams continued, to the point where I could nearly quote them line for line. This went on for years, until I finally decided to document everything that I saw behind closed lids every night. The characters that had always been locked within the recesses of my mind took on a life of their own as they sparred, found comfort, and stood fast before the dangers that haunted them. That chronology was filled in gradually until finally, the story made sense to more people than just me.

All those characters that had been a part of my life for so long were now written down, but I had no plans of ever publishing them. It was enough to have them there, right in front of me, out of my head (it was about time).

Another few years passed, and friends that had read my manuscript continued to push me towards publication. (We’ll disregard the fact that I would send it to them and practically have to bite my tongue off to keep from harassing them for their thoughts on it.) I still had no intention of doing so, despite having begun the process of writing several more books.

Life often has a way of changing that, though. Publication fairly fell in my lap, and I picked it up, looked it over, and decided to make a go for it.

Now, Charlie, Kevin, Danny, Alvaro, and all the MacNamaras are set to be revealed to anyone who wishes to hear their story. It’s a wild ride filled with comedy, danger, and a bit (a lot - if you know me, you get it) of romantic incompetence. A perfect storm, if you ask me, but I’m biased.

A Desert Dweller’s Field Guide to: Taking Down Criminal Enterprise will be out later this year. Stay tuned!