This is what I told myself the day I arrived at the crossroads between mundane life and two characters that haunted my mind so that their story could be told. Both are real, right? Authors surely ask themselves whether the world their mind inhabits is as real as the one their body does.

The thing is, I had been reading. For years. I was thirty years old, I had plenty of books under my belt. And maybe that’s exactly why the characters came to me, informing me that my journey was only just beginning. I had to learn to craft stories, not just see them in small picture frames frozen in time.

I do need to back up a bit. Stories are messy, and sometimes telling them in chronological order isn't the most satisfying for the reader. One of my best friends reminded me that I have a knack for words, and he bet that if I put my mind to it, I could write a novel. I dismissed the idea, immediately comparing myself to the likes of my idols: Tolkien, Hobb, Card, Orwell, Martin, Dumas. The list goes on. As soon as I considered their work, anything I could do would only be failure. But their existence wasn’t to point out any failure; it was to illuminate that it can be done, you only need be inspired.

And I was right. At the time. If you want to be good at something, you have to hone it. And I only started honing it the day I saw Wren and Pip in my mind, furiously working away at a problem to solve in a small hovel underneath a library. Two races, separated by vast land and cultural differences, uniting over… something. I had to discover what was so important.

I graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in Biology, a Minor in Public Health. I never dreamed that my own words could be used for more than facts and data reporting. But I learned that fiction can be so much more than ‘false’ or ‘make believe’. Fiction can tell a story as true as your life. It can communicate an emotion you are feeling, reaching into your soul to reveal a legitimate truth about you or the human condition. Fiction is powerful. And because of that, we ought to take care of the characters that inhabit those worlds. Not coddling them, but staying true to what they represent. Us.

I grew up in suburban Atlanta and now live on the Westside with my wife, Alyssa, son Asa, and two cats, Curie and Cook. Over the last five years I worked in a laboratory at the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, where concepts for this novel were born, like the biofilm used as a Geodesic dome or Nephels named after a Nephelometer.  I have always loved science, but even more I love religious symbolism with weight, with emotion, and with depth. Science and my beliefs became a backdrop for themes I could never just say. I had to show them.