I started my first novel the summer after seventh grade. It was based on a short story I had written for class the previous school year about the passengers of a shipwrecked cruise liner forced to coexist on a deserted island.

I didn’t get very far. Much as I liked writing stories, I far preferred playing outside with my friends.

Eight years later, I began to find a better balance between writing and life. I wrote the early drafts of my first screenplay Vita during my last two years of college, doing most of my work in the dead hours of Friday and Saturday evenings before going out with my friends. Vita went on to win an Honorable Mention award in the 2010 Los Angeles Movie Awards script competition and was named a finalist in the 2011 Sacramento International Film Festival.

After college, I spent a year in Sundsvall, Sweden and Cape Town, South Africa, playing and coaching for local baseball teams and penning my first novel, Our Dried Voices. That novel was published in 2014 and was a finalist for the Foreword Reviews’ INDIES Science Fiction Book of the Year.