"Once upon a time," I’d say, "there was a boy..."
"Named Trevin." He always finished the line that way.
And I would go from there, just making things up until he fell to sleep, telling him stories about someone that he might be.
Like so many boys, as Trevin grew older, he developed a real taste -almost an addiction- for reading fantasy. This began happening right around the time I started writing again, and I remember him telling me how he wanted to be a writer when he grew up.
So I started putting Ghost Medicine, a blending of stories I'd written in the past, together. I suppose I really started writing it for Trevin, but I never intended the novel to be labeled as a "Young Adult" work. It just happened that the story's main characters are in their teens, so it was easy to fit into that particular niche.
What I wanted to do was give my son a book in which the main character, a boy, solves the biggest imaginable problems - contending with death, love, and change - not through magic or fantasy, but with his own human strengths and flaws.
But there is plenty of magic in Ghost Medicine, and Troy, the main character, observes it with wonder and amazement along every step of his journey: the magic of friendship and the unspoken bonds that we form; the magic of the natural world in all its beauty and power; the magic of coincidence that connects every event and makes us believe there is something more than what we see and understand; and the magic of falling in love.
It's really not like anything else that's out there, and I am very happy that my publisher, Jean Feiwel, and editor, Liz Szabla, decided it was a story worth telling, too.
Enjoy.
