It was 2006, and I was in a bad place.

I was probably one of the worst years of my life. I had graduated from bible college in May of 2005, and I had a rough go at transitioning into the adult, career phase of life. I was working as a youth minister at a church in the Atlanta area, and I was not doing a good job. I felt in way over my head. I didn’t like living in such a busy, crowded area. I missed all of my close friends that I had spent nearly every moment of the previous 4 years with. I went through a rough breakup. To top it off, I was living in a basement apartment that had no windows and was a pretty depressing place to be in. I called it the Batcave.

I wasn’t really thrilled with where life had taken me, to say the least. This wasn’t the way life was supposed to go, or so I thought. So I did what any self-loathing 20-something would do. I resigned from my position at the church. Then, I got the worst case of the flu I’d ever had in my life and literally thought I was going to die, alone in my windowless apartment, and nobody would realize it until my landlord Javier came to collect my overdue rent. Like I said, I was not in a good place.

I didn’t die, though. I got a job at Olive Garden and thought I would just concentrate on music for the time being.

Nope.

God had a different plan for me, and on my second day of training, I quit. The next day I moved back home.

And that’s where my journey began.

I was hurting. I was lonely. I felt like a failure. I was fighting against a deep depression, and I had nothing. No job. No friends. I didn’t know how to deal with everything, so I started writing.

I started working part time at my uncle’s computer store, trying to recover my life. I spent my evenings at a local coffee shop, devouring lattes and pouring out my soul through my pen. I wrote whatever came to mind. I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t have an outline. Very reminiscent of the rest of my life at the time. I read Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz, and I was enamored by the style of the book. It was the first memoir I had read in a modern, conversational style, and I loved it. I pictured myself becoming the next Bohemian coffee shop author, writing all of these insightful books about life. Weaving together life stories and biblical truths in a way that was both entertaining and insightful. I had a title and everything: The Art of Life.

I still have several of those early writings. They’re not good. They’re not terrible, but they’re not good. They’re just kind of bland. The content is fine, but the voice isn’t there. Some of them aren’t even complete, and reading back over them, I don’t have a clue where I was going with it. I was trying too hard to be somebody. I was just starting out, and all I had was a little bit of raw talent. I had always been good at writing, but never really realized it. I knew grammar, syntax, structure, all the technical stuff. What I was missing was the soul.

I also remember the first character I ever developed. His name was Aoimusha (which means “blue warrior”). He was a samurai with amnesia who was found washed up on a beach by an old fisherman. The only possession he had was a sword made of jade, and he went on a journey trying to figure out who he was. Yeah, not autobiographical at all. I abandoned Aoimusha shortly thereafter, thinking that the beginning, and story in general, felt too similar to Jason Bourne, but the idea did eventually evolve into Saito, the protagonist of a new series I’m working on, which isn’t really a new series but a reboot of an old one. But more on that later.

I probably will never publish those early writings. And I don’t have to. Not every writing of an author has to be published. Those writings served their purpose. They showed me that writing could be much more than an assignment in a class. Writing back then was a cathartic experience I used to help me cope with life. In some regards, it still is. My characters are me. Every one of them in some way is a little piece of who I am. I write blogs to get out of my head. But it has become so much more than that for me. It’s become a lifestyle.

That's why I use the phoenix as my logo. From the ashes of difficulties and different metaphoric deaths, I was reborn into a new creation. My journey began 11 years ago in a coffee shop in Carrollton, Georgia. I’ve come a long way, and I still have a long way to go, but it certainly has been an adventure.