L. Dean James

You won't find glamorous photos of me. I'm not the glamorous type. But I've always had a passion for writing fiction. If you have a passion for it, too, let me tell you a little story.

I met a friend through a writer's group, when being published was just a dream. We decided to try to write a novel together. We created our world, our characters, our story, then wrote several chapters and took them with us to a writer's convention in San Diego one summer. Being amateurs, we didn't know that it's impolite to take writing to a writing convention and even moreso to offer it to editors and agents.

We soon realized it though, to our embarrassment, and having given chapters to an L.A. based literary agent, we proceeded to hide from him and any others with knowledge of our faux pas. On the last day, a young man caught up with us and told us that the L.A. Literary Agent had read our chapters and wanted to see us. Red-faced, we dragged ourselves to his suite, certain of a dressing down for our impudence.

Instead, we were told to please finish the rest of the novel, a thriller in the tradition of Stephen King, and he would sell it for us. We did, he did, and the rest is sweet history. So continue to write, continue to dream, and be bold whenever you can.