College is a dramatic time, and I milked it good when it came to writing my first novel. But to this day I’ve never felt as driven to put my art above all else as I did then.

I think it had to do with how my first book, The Host, came to be.

One night, after a marathon college drinking session at the local New Paltz bar The Oasis, after the bar shut and I walked to my apartment, after I collapsed in my bed, stared at my walls and followed the thought parade that was keeping me awake until it all quieted down before I was inches from sleep, I heard a whisper in my room, in my head, that didn’t sound like it came from me at all.

I immediately jumped out of bed grabbed a pen and wrote the sentence down on a piece of paper. Then I thought about it a little, and finally fell asleep.

The next morning I saw the paper on my desk. “A tornado is reflective reason,” it read.

For the rest of the day I couldn’t stop thinking about that sentence, and in doing that a whole story opened up in my brain. It felt like a fuse has just been lit. The more I thought about it the more the story grew. Then I sat down, grabbed my favorite silver fountain pen, and the three-year explosion of writing The Host began.

Related posts:

1. The Host, cover, take two
2. And now, the cover of The Host