The question I keep asking myself whenever I look at this massive stack of paper sitting on my desk is: “How the hell did I end up writing a novel?”

I have always loved reading and writing. As you'll find throughout this website, I've written comic book reviews, short stories, and pop culture pieces for sites like Critical Blast, 411 Mania, and Inside Pulse. I've written tabletop RPG campaigns for friends since college and still create games for my children and their friends. I even spent about a year writing for a podcast hosted by WWE wrestler Ryback and adult film star Phoenix Marie.

All that said, I never thought I had a full novel inside me.

A few years ago, I had basically just stopped writing. In a very short period of time, I lost my mom, my dad, my father-in-law, and my uncle. During that same stretch, I almost lost my brother-in-law Chris to a heart attack. Chris and I met working at KB Toys almost thirty years ago. We used to spend hours sitting in Barnes & Noble writing screenplays together.

While writing was always fun to me, it felt like it was never going anywhere, and it was just a waste of time. I had an extended resume full of “exposure,” but that didn't amount to much. So with all this going on it my life, I just decided to not write anymore. I don’t mean to sound melodramatic about it, but it’s exactly what happened.

A few months ago, I felt like I should give my writing one last shot and submitted an extensive portfolio to a magazine that had just launched and claimed they were looking for writers. And yes, we are naming names here: Comics! the Magazine who apparently couldn't be bothered to send so much as a form rejection. When I never heard back from them, I considered that the final nail in the coffin for my writing.

But then SHE appeared.

Late one night, a perfect image came into my head. It was a woman sitting on the counter of a gas station cross-legged, with a coffee in one hand and a romance novel in the other. She had her hair tucked back in a messy bun and was wearing a gray hoodie that was way too big for her.

That would eventually be Allison, though she went through several name changes. I plan on doing a piece about my issues naming characters real soon.

I immediately wanted to know her story. That thought quickly evolved into: “Hey, how would her life be disrupted if the author of that very romance novel came into her gas station one night?”

It sounded like a book I'd want to read. But as I looked around, I couldn't find this specific story about this specific girl anywhere. So a crazy idea popped into my head: “Maybe you can write it.”

To be clear, I don’t typically write lengthy fiction. I don’t read a ton of romance novels, much less write them. But it felt like something I desperately needed to do. I didn’t even tell my wife I was writing for the first two days. I felt embarrassed. I felt like I was building a house of cards that I had no right building in the first place. But as the characters started coming together and scenes began forming in my head, I realized: there is something here worth pursuing.

Over time, the story evolved immensely. It went from a simple fish-out-of-water romance to something I hope is much more thoughtful, a look at the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we tell others.

Ethan and Allison have lived in my head non-stop since I started this, and I hope you enjoy spending time with them as much as I have. They became real to me. At one point, I was so pissed when Ethan ambushed Allison with his big gesture, I literally stopped writing him for two days. It was like I refused to speak to him.

I like to think Ethan, of all people, understands that…

There is a little more to it than that, and I will talk about that in later columns. But in a nutshell, that is the story of The Story of Us.