I've always suspected that I would someday write a novel, and somewhere deep inside me I could always sense it wanting to come oozing out.  But the thing that finally compelled me to actually write it was the way my wife, Harriet, was able to cope with her illness.  Harriet is tough as nails and for the last ten years, she's been battling CML - chronic myeloid leukemia - and so far she's put up one hell of a valiant fight, absolutely refusing to yield to what most doctors would describe as a devastating, life-threatening malady.  Thus she made up her mind long ago to live out a normal existence, avoiding hospitals completely and refraining from seeing doctors as much as possible.  Consequently, it was her grit and determination that inspired me to take pen to paper and flesh out an adventure imbued with these admirable qualities of the spirit.  In its basic subliminal form I wanted to honor her with something unique, essentially a literary work that came from the deepest part of me, something only I could give her, but something which would reflect her iron will and indomitable strength.  This is initially mirrored in the book's opening scene where we find a woman adrift and marooned in a thunderous, tumultuous sea.  She is alone and clinging to a piece of flotsam, and the reader finds the woman to be pregnant.  By all rights, she should accept her fate and succumb to the elements, but she continues to fight on in the face of overwhelming odds, clinging to life and refusing to quit until she has nothing left within her to resist the battering forces of a sea gone mad.  Later in the book we learn the woman survives with the help of a dolphin and that her name is Harriet Grahm.  And although she has no recollection of her former life, she ends up taking on a new identity, becoming Amphitrite, one of the cornerstone characters of the story.  During her ordeal at sea, something incredible has happened to Amphitrite, and her failure to remember her past has somehow given her the power to glimpse the future.  Henceforth she becomes an arrant believer in this power and what the future holds, convinced her visions are real, and it is this ability that spills over and infects the reader to make the story palpable and real.

Writing the novel was a labor of love that took four years to complete.  In creating it, I had to constantly challenge myself to come up with new ideas, not always knowing where the story was headed since some of the characters within the developing plot started taking on a life of their own.  I only knew I wanted to take the reader on a journey to high adventure, an escape from the often mundane routines of everyday life most of us encounter, and in adhering to this I kept imagining what I'd like to see on the big screen if the novel was ever made into a blockbuster movie.

About the novel:

The Girl Who Rode Dolphins is a fast-paced and explosive action-adventure that is epic in scope, making use of a loaded plot and holding back an array of mysteries and unanswered questions until the last 150 pages where everything comes together in a fantastical, high-suspense thriller. Within the adventure there are 22 action scenes that will keep the reader thoroughly enraptured, and at times electrified according to those who have read it.  Fitting the novel into a specific fictional category can be subjective since the story falls within the boundaries of several genres.  The fact that it brims with action-adventure on an epic scale cannot be denied, and although it can also be argued that it has the makings of a mystery/thriller, it can just as well fit two other genres.  The storyline is spiced with healthy doses of fantasy, science fiction and philosophic viewpoints that tie right into a modern world and some of its most pressing issues: Islamic terrorism, global warming, and mankind's greatest vice, that of greed. And inasmuch as Haiti's past leadership and historical events, both past and present, were used as a backdrop for the writing of this novel, history was merged with fiction in such a way as to make the epic believable.  The story is further enriched by a diverse cast of personalities, some exceedingly virtuous, some sickeningly evil, and others in between, a few of whom are ultimately forced toward epiphany and a re-examination of their self-identity. Finally, the reader is led to wonder if the characters themselves are somehow being manipulated by a force far greater than themselves with the introduction of James Lovelock's controversial Gaia Hypothesis, an idea that the entire earth is alive and acts as a complete organism, possessing various self-regulating mechanisms for its survival.