My Beloved Daughter,

During the summer after my graduation, I spent any free time that I had writing.  It took just over a month to finish the very first draft of what would eventually become the first book of The Adventure Chronicles.

From that initial, handwritten short story from my junior year, I expanded to 171 typed pages.  I tweaked the plot a bit.  Gone was the cat-worshipping cult.  The villain clan became an ancient enemy of the heroic clan (the Funakoshi).  I created the background of the war, which is still in the opening of the published book.

The most important change that I made was the creation of Yoshi.

Through several fighting video games and novels that I had enjoyed over the past couple of years, I had gained an appreciation for tough females.  Yoshi was my entry into this field.  Initially a female clone of Jamie, they both had identical fighting styles.  While her parents had always been killed by the villain clan, she had not initially been the rebellious child that she became in the published novel.

The book poured out of me that summer, as I had no other real responsibilities to keep me from writing.  When I finally finished writing it, I printed the whole thing off on my dot-matrix printer and put it in a green binder that I kept on my bookshelf.  JD used a black marker and white-out to draw a serviceable ninja-to (the short sword that the ninja used in the 80s ninja movies and, thus, my books) on the cover of the binder.  Initially, the book was simply titled ADVENTURE.

I began writing the sequel immediately.  Unfortunately, not having readers really made me lose interest and, after the first couple of chapters, I stopped writing for the next three years.  By the time I picked up where I’d left off, I had walked through some very dark places.

It took me nearly the full three years to see Who had been walking with me.