Writing it Without Having Been There I’m not certain how it happened, but it did. I was in the throws of writing The Killing Game and one day I looked at a photograph of a man and directly into his eyes, a man from the former Yugoslavia. In my head, I heard a man’s voice, “Write a story about my country.” I heard that voice in my head so clearly as if whoever he was right there with me. Whose voice was it I heard? God’s? My favorite, Archangel Michael’s? Or someone else’s? It was difficult to know, but it was an idea I could not let go of. I tried not to think about it, but again, within about fifteen minutes to half an hour, I was busily typing the opening sequence on my computer. At that point, I had written the story from beginning to end inside my head and it was now clamoring to get out. This was dur - ing the Christmas holiday of 1994 when the siege for Sarajevo was hot and heavy. I had read and listened to the news about the war, but I did not quite understand it. The press painted the reason behind the war as “ethnic cleansing due to religious differences” but that sounded so bogus. So I started to dig. I started asking ques - tions and found that most of the facts were cloaked in the propaganda of the war’s side effects. I started searching for people from the former Yugoslavia and I found them. I asked questions and received many different points of view—it was a bit mind boggling. From all the information I gleaned, there was more confusion than sense to be made of it all. That, in essence, was the crux of the war and would be the backdrop of my story. Misconceptions, lies, deceptions, loss and, lost causes gave me only a few choices for conjuring a story about a place I had neither traveled to nor seen the war up close. Actually, I’ve never seen war up close. I have seen a lot of things in life but not war. So how do I write about it? First, I had to decide what the story would be about. That took a whole of two sec - onds. I write about interpersonal relationships (let’s call it IR for this segment). And what sort of IR would this story be about? Naturally a man and woman, but not the typical man/woman relationship. War would cause issues, would it not? Are they both from Yugoslavia or from somewhere else? If they were from the same country, they might be clawing to get out of there. If from different countries, how would they get in? Or better, why? At the time, there were several movies in the works about this situation but my story had to be different. Nothing yet told the everyday stories of those who fought to stay alive in this war. I wanted my story to be about that. No one spoke about the everyday heroes that stove to help others who could not help themselves. The news made it sound as if the civilian populace were rabid dogs, fighting with anyone and everyone to get what they could. And that was only when they cared to report on civilians other than the major atrocities. But the press has always been about sensational - ism because that sells newspa - pers. I wanted something differ - ent. Something that would speak to the heart and soul of the peo - ple. The answer was obvious. A man from Yugoslavia and a woman from America. But what would bring her out of her comfortable existence in the US to a war-torn coun - try? It did not take long to formulate the answer, which was a concern since I first heard about the war—the children who had lost their parents? Yes, an orphan would be something motivating to bring the heroine from her safe environment. It would be enough to make me want to find her. So the story would be about a man from Yugoslavia, a woman from America, and an orphan. I had written a sketch before I found sites documenting the atrocities of this war. My sketches consist of cohesive thoughts laid out in the order they will occur, usually needing the details filled in later. So I wrote this sketch before I read about the prison camps held by all three warring sides: Muslims, Croatians, and Serbians. Mind you, when I use these ethnic titles, I am speaking about the military sides of the war, not the civilian population. However, nationalist ideologies do bleed out into the civilian population. But my story is about one man, with only the ideology of what is right by God’s laws. It was my goal to tell the story of a man who, though not of Ser - bian descent, was raised by a Serbian family. In this situation, a lesser man might have been swayed by his nationalist ancestry and turned on the very people that gave him a beautiful life. In the heroes own words: For now, I am not going to go into details about what caused the war. Read the book and you will get enough information to understand its cause without belaboring the war itself. Read the book and you will be pulled into an adventure, less about war and more about love and honor. Through those emotions, your heart will feel the story. It will feel the plight of those souls stuck in the middle of warring factions, fighting for all they felt was right. And when it comes to the end you will either relate to the characters and say to yourself, that’s exactly what I would have done. Or you will slam the book shut and say getting involved was stupid. Regardless, you will have felt something and that, in the end, is what writing is about. Love, hate, sorrow, joy—whatever the emotion, the point is that you felt it while you were in the Here we go, this was a challenge. I started laying out book cov - ers back in 1995. I tried images that looked like postcards, searched the Internet for images to purchase, created a plain cover…nothing quite fit the story. In 2012, when I gave myself a deadline to publish the story, I again started searching for the perfect cover photo. It had to be a photograph that captured the mood of the novel. Unlike my other series, The Killing Game Series, which is more of a dark drama, this story always gave me a sense of the color gray or blue. Again, I searched online. The years made a difference on what could be purchased from stock photo companies. I searched, but nothing was right. Being a photogra - pher, I almost always have some form of a camera in my possession. In the morning when I’m out in the yard with my pup, I’m usually photographing her. (Last count was about 8 years ago and I had a little over 17,000 photographs of her. I can only imagine how many I’ve taken since.) The view from the yard is spectacular, especially in winter. I had spent a good deal of time photographing the woods and I was intrigued by the trees across the lake approximately half a mile away. I spent several days the winter of 2013 capturing images. I transferred the photographs to my computer, not actually examining them because I could take 100 or so in any one session. In Search of the Perfect Cover Photo Spring came and I thought perhaps a cemetery would give me the atmosphere I sought. I wrote to two of the larger historic cemeteries just outside of Manhattan, gained permission to photograph there and found several worthy statues. Even with the fabulous shots I took, the cover wasn’t coming from that session. Typically the way I photograph is shooting a series of the very same subject, chang - ing lighting, angle, etc. Most of the time I will do what I call a sweep, using the motor drive at high speed to reduce blur when not using a tripod. That sometimes provides hundreds of photographs to examine and look through. That is time consuming, but a valuable practice because each millisecond the light changes and the captured essence in one shot may not have been in the shot before or just after. I went back and began reviewing all the winter shots I had and there were three pho - tographs, taken in succession, of three different locations of the trees across the lake on February 11, 2013. The first was taken at 1:00 pm, the second at 1:02 pm, and the third at 1:03 pm. Nothing was taken in between. The time lapse was me moving from one location to the next. Three individual scenes, all beauti - ful and secretive. My goal was to see the trees across the lake while simultaneously creating a mystery as if someone is looking through binoculars or perhaps a rifle scope. Someone who is hiding, someone who doesn’t want to be seen. The winner was obvious. After manipulating the color to bring out the blue emotion, the end result was what you see to the right. After changing the hue, finding the right lightness and adding the text, the front cover was perfect for the story. To the left was the final product. Quite often I get scolded for obscuring my name. But the story is about the characters, even if my heart and soul are behind each and every word. Writing is an art. Once you have committed your story to paper, finding the perfect image to reflect what your heart has transcribed is sometimes the hardest part of the entire writing process. It is said, “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” They’re right. Just as you can’t judge a book by its title (another thing I hear about from people). Yet it is true. “A picture is worth a thousand words.” And even if everyone doesn’t see the wintery mystery of someone spying through the trees in this cover, my heart is content in knowing no other image could take its place. In the end, the perfect cover photograph was right in my backyard…