Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) is setting the world of digital publishing on its head.  Tomorrow, I will use one of its unique features.

On Friday, March 16, LAST ONE CHOSEN, my fast-paced legal thriller will be offered for free on the Kindle store.

I’ll keep you posted on my foray into KDP, but for the time being I wanted to tell you how LAST ONE CHOSEN came to be written. It is a story shared by thousands of indie authors.

For years, I had dreamed of writing a novel. I would start one, get thirty pages or so into it, then set it aside, never coming back to it.

Then it struck me that I wasn’t getting any younger.

So,  I did what so many other writers have done before me.  I wrote some short stories, began attending workshops on writing, read a handful of books on how to write. I joined a writing group, became friends with some authors and listened to their stories about the writing process.

Yet, I still made little progress. I would write some pages, re-read them, re-write them, re-read them, re-write them.

The breakthrough came for me when I hired a writing coach, a Pulitzer nominated prolific author by the name of Jory Sherman.  I sent him the seventy pages I had written and went to see him to talk about the project. “All that you need to write your book is within you,” Jory told me. “It will come to you as you write.”

Somehow, those few words opened the writing world up to me. Within about three months, I had finished the first draft, approximately 75,000 words. Since then, I have written four other novels of similar length and never looked back.

I don’t know if other writers have had the same experience, but for me finishing the complete first draft of a novel unlocked my spirit.  What seemed an insurmountable hurdle for years disappeared behind me as I  moved forward.

That’s why I tell other writers  not to get bogged down while they are working.  Keep moving toward the end of the book, don’t kill it before it ever breathes its first breath.

LAST ONE CHOSEN is the story of the government’s attempt to silence a brilliant scientist when he refuses to cooperate with the government’s attempt to build the ultimate weapon of mass destruction. It is a fast-paced legal thriller. But it is more than that.  On a deeper level, in the historical vein of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, it is a tale about the one true person, the person whose desire to do good for his fellow man sows the seeds of his own destruction.

So, my fellow writers, keep at it.  Don’t give up ’til you type “The End.”  You never know where it may lead.

And if you are looking for a free book to fill up your Kindle this Friday, please drop by and take a look at LAST ONE CHOSEN.