I really love fruit. Fruit is healthy and good for the kids so I buy in bulk but I really hate fruit flies. They are so tiny and annoying and when you try to kill them (smash them, clap then to death, slam them against the counter), you miss 9 out of 10 times. Sometimes when you are tracking them (hunting them, if we are being honest), they seem to disappear. I started to believe that they must be slipping into another dimension and that’s why they are so hard to kill. Blipping in and out of dimensions, they remained wily, oily and relentlessly annoying. That got me thinking.
Around the same time, I started reflecting about the choices one makes in life and how different life could be if you decided to do x instead of why, go to medical school, instead of film school, go to a party and meet the love of your life, instead of stay home and chill, make yourself a salad instead of eating that questionable piece of fish from that questionable restaurant. What if you were able to see the consequences of your choices and go back and make a different choice? How different would your life be? Would you be the same person?
With those two ideas floating around in my head, NaNoWriMo rolled around in November of 2015 and under the pressure of a daily word count, the story bloomed. It was so much fun to write, so much fun to research and so much fun to just imagine how to tell a heroic story from the inside, with all the messiness, distractions and doubts of a person who was not at all interested in becoming a hero.
The cover art is dope? Yeah, right?! I was celebrating my bestie's birthday down in New Orleans, happened to stroll down this street full of wonderful artists selling their artwork, saw this piece called "Foxy" and fell in love with it. Fortunately, the artist, was open to me licensing the work and I finally had the perfect cover for this complicated story. Here's his info if you want to see more of his work:
ART87JR aka Jason Rodriguez, [email protected]