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The result was a novella called Ambition about a man named Rodney Olson whose father dies during his race to beat Roger Maris’ 1961 homerun record, prompting him to return to Calgary where he eventually meets the love of his life: the aptly named, Deanna.

The story was fun, the characters wooden and the structure flimsy. But it was a start, and the response I got hardly had the strength to deter me from continuing. So I did. I started an enormous project about a serial killer, a killer, mind you, that finds a brief, tongue in cheek appearance in The Inlands. The book was called Gladman. I’ll let you find the reference from there. The book grew far too big for me to contain it; the characters took over the story in a fashion that ultimately imploded the plot, severing the first half of the book from the second. But it was practice, and like I’ve always been told, practice makes perfect. It wasn’t until I saw Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring when I understood the magnificent power of the fantastic, and the hold other worlds have over us. There’s a certain draw to them…it isn’t just about the escape, really, but rather watching a version of what if. What if the world had actually turned out like this?