Digital Short Saturday Guest Post Jason McIntyre

[Giovanni Gelati]

I'm new(ish) to the world of ebooks. Up to this point, many authors have felt ebooks were the second string player to traditional print media. These days, though, e-everything is taking off and books in digital form
are no exception. Every maker of the reading devices has upped their game and
the gadgets themselves are of such high quality now. As such, the marketing of ebooks has taken to
the Internet, out of its natural relationship to the digital books, more than anything
else.

Much of my own networking efforts to help inspire folks to pick up a copy of my novel "On The Gathering Storm" has been Internet-based as well. And recently, I
was asked a very broad question by a reader to talk about some of my inspirations
for writing the story.

I usually get an image in my head, from nowhere, sparked by a story on the news or, yes, even a dream I had.

My novel "On The Gathering Storm" was sparked when I met a beautiful young woman named Hannah who was standing in front of the historic Empress Hotel in downtown Victoria.
This is the capital city located on lush and beautiful Vancouver Island,
where my book ultimately takes place. We got to talking, this blonde, blue-eyed
Stranger, about her life goals, her boyfriend and more. I've been told that I
have an uncanny ability to get people talking, even folks who normally have
problems sharing or letting others into their 'caves'. I got the impression
that this Hannah was a very closed person so it amazed even me when we sat down
for a coffee and she went into her wants and fears like this. Maybe I was safe
for her. A bottle on the ocean that she could poor some of these fears and
hopes into, then re-cork and set adrift. Maybe she'd already made up her mind
that she'd never see me again.

Her hope was to get married, have two kids and still maintain a kick-ass career, I'd say a pretty common goal for women of her generation at this stage in history. As we talked, and as she waited for her
bus, the seed was born for the book. The character of Hannah became a composite
of several women in my life at the time but the essence was me thinking,
"Hey, if I was a bad guy I could listen to this girl talk and talk and
talk about her goals and her aspirations and I could probably turn this
situation in a direction where I could get her away from the public
areas..." Now, despite my brooding profile pic, I'm not a serial killer,
so I didn't do that but the thinking about how that *could* happen in the real
world got me to writing it down. I
started that very afternoon in my little third-storey attic studio which had no
heat and bad windows and leaked like a seive when it rained. And it rained a
lot on Vancouver Island.

My stories tend to be about everyday people who are yanked into extraordinary circumstances and there is usually a twist of the supernatural. In this case, Hannah morphed into Hannah Garretty in the finished
novel, "On The Gathering Storm". She's a 29-year old photographer
living a somewhat mainstream existence with her granola-eating hippie
roommates. She gets into a fender bender with a strange man and has I guess
what you would call a premonition about some bad things he may or may not have
done, possibly to the blonde-haired companion in his vehicle. This pulls Hannah
into his world where she is suddenly in the fight for her life.

They say the hardest part is starting a story but I disagree: it's finishing something you feel is worth while. In my heart, this story is very worthwhile and I hope readers will feel the same.

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