I Want You to Feel Something

People sometimes ask if my novels are autobiographical.

The answer is both yes and no.

The events aren’t my life. The characters aren’t copies of people I’ve known. They may have borrowed names, borrowed laughs, borrowed memories, or even a single story that stayed with me for forty years. But by the time they reach the page, they’ve become entirely themselves.

What is autobiographical is something much harder to explain.

There are pieces of me in every character.

Not the facts of my life.

The emotions.

The hope.

The fear.

The stubbornness.

The belief that people deserve second chances.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been humbled by the reviews readers have left for Anywhere But Here. What surprised me wasn’t that people enjoyed the story—it was what they chose to talk about afterward.

They didn’t focus on plot twists or suspense.

Instead, they wrote things like:

“The characters are what wrecked me.”

“I found myself in every single one of them.”

“I want to be adopted by the Calderon family immediately.”

One reader even said that the New Mexico landscape felt like another character in the novel.

As an author, I can’t imagine receiving a greater compliment.

Because that’s exactly what I hope to do every time I sit down to write.

I want to write something that makes people feel.

I want readers to laugh with my characters, cry with them, celebrate their victories, and grieve their losses. I want them to recognize a little bit of themselves in the people they meet on the page.

I want the landscape to be as much a part of the story as the people.

The Sandia Mountains. The North Valley cottonwoods. The smell of roasting chile. The Spanish music drifting through an open window. The long highways that stretch across New Mexico and Colorado. The mountains that become both refuge and challenge.

Places shape us.

They become part of our memories, our identities, and the stories we tell ourselves. They deserve to live and breathe alongside the people who inhabit them.

Most of all…

I want people to care about what happens to them.

Not because they’re perfect.

Because they’re human.

Because they’ve laughed too loudly, made terrible decisions, carried impossible burdens, loved deeply, failed spectacularly, and found the courage to keep going anyway.

If a reader finishes one of my novels wishing they could sit at Mama Calderon’s table, drive through the mountains with Jessi and Ryan, laugh with Elaine, argue with Becky, or spend one more afternoon with Bear…

…then I’ve done what I set out to do.

Stories stay with us because of people.

The places matter.

The adventures matter.

The suspense matters.

But years later, what we usually remember are the people who made us feel less alone.

Those are the stories I hope to write.