THE OBSESSION struck me at an early age.

My life was basically divided into two categories.

I was reading a book.

Or I was looking for a new book and sometimes and old book to read.

I picked cotton for a penny a pound and saved enough money to buy books.

I borrowed books.

Thank God for libraries.

One night I finished The Guns of Navarone by Alistair Maclean.

A suicide mission.

Impossible odds.

No one expected to survive.

No one dared to quit.

I closed the pages, looked up at the ceiling, and thought:

I want to write like that.

I read Shane by Jack Schaefer.

A story of violence.

And love.

A stranger hoping to escape the sins of his past.

A stranger who would never outrun his past.

He did what he had to do.

Those who had to die died.

And then he rode away.

The stranger broke the heart of a woman married to a good man.

He left a young boy begging him not to leave.

I read it once.

Then again.

And I told myself:

I want to write like that.

I lived the pages of Nevil Shute’s On the Beach.

The world was ending.

Radiation was spreading across and around the globe.

People were dying.

Soon there would be no one left.

I didn’t even know why I should attend class.

It was a waste of time.

We were all doomed anyway.

And, when my senses cleared, I thought:

I want to write like that.

The years passed.

The obsession remained.

After sixty-seven books – both fiction and nonfiction – after hundreds of newspaper articles and thousands of magazine stories, after three screenplays and almost a thousand blogs, I am gripped by the same thoughts I had then.

I close my eyes and remember the storylines and plotlines and characters who gripped the pages of The Guns of Navarone, Shane, and On the Beach.

Nothing has changed.

The thoughts I had then I have now.

I want to write like that.