How does an author get started? Bill Garrison, author of Castle Gate Press’s first book The Day She Died, got his writing start covering sports for his college newspaper in Oklahoma.
During that time, he grew in love with a well-told story. He read countless novels and watching many movies. Every-day events were given a small twist and given a place in a fantastic adventure forming in his mind.
He majored in business and began a career in a accounting. But the stories remained in his mind and, in the evenings after the kids were in bed, he started writing. What to write about? A globe-crossing spy novel? A high-tech suspense novel? Or a more personal novel, a mystery?
His thoughts turned to what-ifs. What if he’d played sports in high school, instead of dropping out? What if he and his wife had made wiser decisions about their money when they got out of college?
What if he could actually re-live his life? What would he do differently? Would life be perfect then? No, he decided. Some things would be fixed, but others would become broken.
“You can go back and things might be better, but it’s not a given that everything would turn out better.” He pondered. “If I we hadn’t bought new cars right out of school, we might have made a different bad decision.”
This dialogue with himself about regrets led him to write The Day She Died, about a middle-aged doting father who has been stewing in regrets for twenty years about the disappearance and probable murder of his college fiancee.
Somehow, he finds himself waking up in his college dorm room the morning of the day she died. Can he prevent her death? If so, what happens to his real-life wife and kids?
The book releases in October. If you want to read the first three chapters, join our mailing list on the right side of this page.
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Debut author Bill Garrison lives the American Dream with his family of five in Oklahoma City. As a graduate of Oklahoma University, Bill works in the healthcare and accounting industry by day, but lives his creative side once he leaves the corporate world. After putting the kids to bed with a good story, he turns to his laptop and spins his daydreams into novels. Bill Garrison, CPA by day, story weaver by night.