No better place than to start at the beginning.
In 2020, it felt like my personal life was coming unglued by my own design. A lot of old, subconscious wounds opened up. They festered for a while.
Finally, in 2021, I checked myself into an online therapist. For the most part, it went well. It gave me the ability to start seeing a lot of things come to light with my past, my childhood, my parents, and the things that I buried.
The idea for writing slowly came to life in the wake of running a marathon. As post-race injuries nagged at me, I found myself with a lot of free time. Combining the two overlapping areas of my therapy for my childhood and the free time to think about it all, I decided to start writing more than just my usual poems or lyrics.
I asked myself how I could deal with some inner demons? I came up with the idea of a detective novel, based around the environments that I love - Hawaii and surfing. For the central character, I based him mostly on me. He has a lot of my personality, a lot of my demons, and the frustrations I deal with. I put myself into the headspace I felt during my high school and college years. It was an easy place to find myself, since so much stuff had resurfaced.
How could I deal with the demons that were nagging me and pour them into my character? I literally gave him my issues - a mother who died of cancer, a mostly absent father, and a frayed relationship behind a lot of anger and sadness. It helped drive the characters. It also helped me process a lot of what I was feeling. It was very cathartic in that sense. It allowed me to look myself while submerging myself into the life of someone else.
Naming the two main characters was a simple process. As a big fan of alliteration, I wanted names that sounded superheroesque, like Peter Parker. So, I landed on Jake Jansen for the main character and his father, Jack. They say giving characters similar names can get confusing, but in reading it, I felt it flowed okay with minimal mix-up. My readers felt the same, so I stayed with them.
But what about the story itself? How could this work in a detective novel? Well, that was easy, writing a father who was a retired Naval Investigator with a son studying criminology at the local university. That gave me smooth waters to navigate through.
I’d never written a novel before, but I cranked through it in about four-and-a-half weeks. Yes, there were a lot of edits. In fact, after thinking I was done, it came back from a beta reader, and something nagged at me and told me it wasn’t finished. So, I added more. And that’s the version I’ll be pushing out here, a chapter at a time.
Happy reading all and thanks for taking this journey!
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John