Whatever it is that urges my fingers around the keyboard in their curious, homegrown hunt and peck style, I am grateful and afraid. Because I don't know why it happens. I don't know where it comes from. I—and this is the real knee-knocking stuff—I don't know how long I have until those deep, dark wells in my cerebral cortex may decide to dry up. Best not to examine it all too closely, right? Like everyone, I'm just along for the ride.

What I do know is that I owe a great debt to the writers that kept my flashlight glowing under the covers so many years ago. Rod Serling, R.L. Stevenson, precious Miss Shelley and Bram Stoker, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, H.G. Wells and Lovecraft, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Erle Stanley Gardner, Shirley Jackson, Dean Koontz and my lodestone Stephen King. (I love you, man.)

I've worked for many years in advertising as a copywriter and a creative director. That is the only thing James Patterson and I have in common, regrettably. James Dickey once worked at my ad agency in Atlanta, also as a copywriter. He got his Deliverance long before I came along. The point of it all is that advertising kept my wheels greased and may have even prepared me for this writer's path I've chosen. I hope so. I'm having a blast. And I'm humbled by the whole damn thing.