The title of this post might sound like something that a kid might talk about during show and tell at school, and I have to admit that I sure did feel like a kid when I met Mr. Koontz. Of course, to understand this, we’re going to have to take a little trip back in time. Actually, we’re going to take two trips back in time. Here we go. This is going to be a long one (believe it or not, this is actually the shorter version).

The Late Seventies and the Early Eighties

My mother taught me to read long before I ever set foot in a school. She read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to me when I was barely able to walk. She instilled a love of stories that has lasted my entire life and for which I will always be grateful. She read everything that she could and I followed suit. I would find paperbacks that she’d finished and I always gravitated toward the odd, the mysterious, the macabre and the fun. I read Agatha Christie and Doyle, H.G. Wells and Jack London as well as countless others.

I discovered Stephen King and Dean Koontz shortly thereafter, and I’ve never been the same since. I mean that in the best way possible. I devoured everything I could find, and my mother even talked with the local librarians so they would allow me to check out books from the “grown up” section of the library. I would stay up late into the night reading. When other kids were wondering what strange new things they could do with their hair and to their jeans, I was wondering what was happening in Snowfield and in Derry.

(Ok, I also did some weird things with my hair, but that’s not the point. The point is that I was hooked on imaginary places, addicted to stories.)

Fast Forward to the Late Nineties

I’d moved all the way from New York to California with a brief stop in Chicago. I was married and had a child. I was just out of the military and I really had no direction in life. Finding work was hard and I escaped to fiction. I would also call my mother and talk with her, although I never really let on about how poor I was.

I still read all the time, and I’d even started writing my own stories in the hopes of publishing them. I’d always written, but I didn’t know what to do with the stories. Now that I had the time, I figured I would give it a shot.

I ended up selling quite a few to the small press “zines” of the day as well as to an anthology or three. If you’ve been around a while, you might remember those old zines, labors of love for the editors, often photocopied and stapled together. Some had cardstock covers but most didn’t even have that. They weren’t attractive magazines by any standard, but they had some good stories in them. I was proud to be in them.

Now, when I say I sold to the magazines, it wasn’t as though I was making much money. The term “sell” rarely meant anything more than a contributor’s copy and maybe $5 or $10 in those days. I wasn’t getting rich, that’s for damned sure. The most I’d made on a sale at that time was around $100 for a 900-word story, sold to a computer magazine of all places. They had a slot in each issue for a fiction piece, and I got lucky… or the editor was drinking and then decided to buy the story. I say that because the story was embarrassingly bad. I didn’t know that at the time of course. And that extra money sure helped that month. Kids grow out of clothes damned quick.

Now, you might be wondering where Dean Koontz plays into all of this. Well, I’m getting there.

When Koontz was doing a tour for Seize the Night, shortly after Fear Nothing came out in paperback and one of his stops was at a Barnes & Noble just north of San Diego. My neighbor, who was also a big reader, told me about the signing. She, my wife and I decided that we would go up, pick up copies of Seize the Night and get them signed.

We got to the bookstore and I couldn’t believe the line that I saw. It stretched outside the store, and after we got in the line, it doubled. Dean Koontz was a rock star.

As I got closer to the table where he was signing, I started getting nervous. That’s not something that normally happens to me, but there I was, nerves getting worse as I got closer to the table. I mean, this is the guy who wrote Phantoms and Darkfall. He frigging wrote Watchers. The guy knows suspense and can make you sweat with just words on a page. I was only feet away from getting my book signed by the man whose writing caused me stay up into the wee hours of morning, sleep be damned.

I make it to the front and I’m surprised that the case of nerves had vanished. Koontz looks up and smiles. He asks my name. I tell him, and I’m shocked that I don’t stutter. Something about him seemed calming and soothing, silly as that sounds.

He asks how I am, and I tell him that I’m fine and that I’m excited to meet him because I’m a writer too. (Now, I know he must’ve heard that a million times, but I didn’t know any better at the time). He smiles again and asks me what I write. I tell him that I write horror and fantasy, and that I would like to write mystery and crime. I tell him that he’s been a huge influence on me. I tell him that I’ve been in some magazines.

He smiles again, and it looks genuine. And then he starts talking to me about writing. I’m trying to listen, but my brain keeps shouting at me “Holy crap, Dean Koontz is talking to me about writing.” I listen as he talks about telling stories and about how he started, and then the woman at the table helping him (who I believe was his wife), nudges him gently and reminds him that he has an entire line of people still waiting for autographs. As I start to excuse myself, he tells me something else. He says, “Keep writing. You can succeed if you don’t give up.” I’m paraphrasing because I don’t remember the exact words, but that was the gist of it. And I knew I’d heard someone tell me those words before, but I couldn’t quite place where I’d heard them.

Now, you might think that those words stuck with me and that I kept writing and selling more. Of course, life got in the way. By life, I mean a divorce after the birth of my second child, a job that drained the creativity from me and an overall loss of direction. Some people can write through all of that, and more power to them. I couldn’t. I barely even read during that time.

But I had stories to tell, and I couldn’t stay away from writing forever. Writing, I discovered, was a basic human need for me. I wasn’t happy unless I was telling tales and creating worlds that don’t really exist. I slowly got back into the groove of life and I heeded those words. “Keep writing. You can succeed if you don’t give up.”

So, I kept at it. I made more sales over the past few years. I’ve had my first book published through Black Bed Sheet Books, and I’ve even started publishing some of my own work to see what the indie world is like. I’m not rich, but with freelancing and fiction, I do write for a living now. So far, it’s good.

The Present

Not everything in life is going to be good.

My mom died in February of this year, and I didn’t know how to handle the news. She’d moved to Southern California years ago, but I wasn’t with her when she passed away. It happened faster than I thought it could. I was going to visit her in the hospital and I found out the next morning that she’d passed away the night before. I wasn’t with her enough in those last few years, and that’s something that I have to carry with me.

In my mind, I didn’t want to accept that she would or could die. As much as I write about death, I don’t know how to properly grieve and go through those issues like a normal human. I know the stages of grief, I know how they work, and I think I can write it convincingly. My brain just wasn’t having it.

I wasn’t a bad son, I don’t think. But my brother was far better at dealing with this issue than I was. When he was growing up, we called him “Tenderheart” for a reason. He was there for her more often than I was, and so was John, her boyfriend who happened to be the best thing that had ever happened to her. I am very thankful that they were there when I was too weak/stupid/afraid to be. She knows I loved her though. I always told her that.

I was reflecting on this the other night, and when I couldn’t bear to think about it any longer, I suddenly had an itch to read some Koontz. It seems like a strange leap, right?

My hardcover and paperback books had gone missing in a move years ago, so I opened my Kindle and downloaded Phantoms, one of my favorites. I was digging into the story for what would be my umpteenth read through, and I heard those words in my head again. “Keep writing….” And then I suddenly remembered where I’d heard them other than from Mr. Koontz.

My mother had said them to me when she found out I was writing all those years ago. She had been proud of me, even when I was only making those $5 sales and contributor copies. She’d always believed in me even when I didn’t believe in myself.

How could I have forgotten that? I sometimes think that we don’t always appreciate the ones who are closest to us when they are here. In fact, I know that’s true. There’s always tomorrow, you think. Here’s the rub. Tomorrow is not promised. Live for today, tell the ones you love just how much you care for them.

Oh, and if you are a writer, keep writing.