When I was 9-years-old back in Newark, Delaware, USA, my third grade elementary school class had a "business day." All the kids made products to sell, and then we sold our products to each other using fake money. At the time, I had a dream of becoming a fiction writer one day, and so I wrote three "books" and made many copies of each them. I use the term "books" loosely as they were more like pamphlets. But anyway. Unfortunately, my classmates made toys and cookies and candies. I think my teacher was the only one who bought one of my books, mostly out of pity. I remember being crushed and thought that books must not be a valuable commodity. In retrospect, I just didn't know my target market: third-graders love toys and sweets. But the damage was done. I was out of the fiction business.
Life went on. I grew up and went off to university and majored in neuroscience (more familiarly known as brain science). I worked in a research laboratory during my undergraduate years, and fell in love with biomedical research. A new dream blossomed: running my own neuroscience research laboratory one day. There are so many exciting things to study in neuroscience, but I was especially interested in what addictive drugs do to the brain, so I got a PhD in neurobiology (again, another word for brain science) studying what cannabis/marijuana-like drugs do to brain cells. I continued to follow that career arc, going on to do a postdoctoral fellowship studying opioid effects on the brain. My (new) dream then came true. I was offered a faculty position at the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA and got to lead my very own research laboratory studying how opioids and alcohol change the way the brain works. I worked there for over eight years, but decided that I needed a change of scenery, so I transferred to the University of Minnesota Medical School, pretty much doing the same things, just somewhere else.
By most objective measures, I've been a very successful scientist. I've published over 50 scientific papers, been awarded many research grants from the National Institutes of Health, trained and mentored many brilliant young scientists, taught a few courses, and made a few discoveries that I think are pretty exciting. But I've always had this nagging question in the back of my mind: what if you had become a novelist instead, like your nine-year-old self wanted to be? I mean, I am a published author many times over. But that's technical writing. It is storytelling of a sort, but it can be very dry and frankly dull at times. Despite not having written anything fictional in decades, I still had these stories running through my head. What if I could make that nine-year-old me's dream come true? So I did.
This is the blog of my journey. What story did my nine-year-old self write? What did I do with my neuroscience career? Did it matter? Where did the idea for a novel come from? Why didn't I do it sooner? What were the challenges shifting from technical writing to fiction writing? What are the obstacles I did not expect to find, and what did I do about them? And what is this novel even about (and is it any good)?
Stay tuned as I take you on this journey with me.
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