When I was twelve years old, I read Victor Hugo's Les Miserable.  It was a kid's version, but it changed my life, initiating a deep love of fiction.  Devorah Omer was another writer I devoured.  She wrote stories set in Israel's early days, with young people fighting to build the nation, fighting to build a home.  Everything was larger than life and intoxicating.

After university, I discovered Ayn Rand.  Her rational, beautiful heroes filled my imagination; I felt like a child walking through sunlit uplands.

Now, I write my own stories with the same rational, benevolent outlook on life.  This hasn't always been the case.  I wanted to write rational stories, but they didn't come out that way; there was too much baggage from the past, and there were too many points of focus interfering with the storytelling, such as my love of language and philosophy.

But my latest project, the gem of my creative life, began as a philosophical idea and has turned out a beautiful story.  Individual rights lie at the heart of it.  I wanted to show a culture in which a man-made determinism robs people of their right to choose, thereby making the rational process an irrelevant redundancy.  But I wanted to be sure I do this in story form, never forgetting that the project is a story.  So, I determined to write for young adults.

The premise is simple.  Our world has produced a reflection of itself, the way a sound produces an echo.  Every tree, flower, animal has a reflection--an Echo.  And so does every man.  We, the Sounds, know nothing of the existence of Echoes.  But they know about us, and bind themselves to our world in a terrible way.  No Echo is allowed to outlive his Sound.  A whole system of legal murder makes sure of that.

The story begins when Will Cleary, a twelve-year-old Sound, discovers that his Echo is the Prince, whose enemies are trying to kill him--by killing his Sound.  To save his life and the life of his family, Will chooses to enter the Echo realm and take on the immense task of setting the Sounds free of the Echoes.

To learn more about The Sound and the Echoes, check out my Current Project and Sample Chapters pages on this site.  You can hear me reading the chapters on the audio page.  I am currently in the process of seeking literary representation for this novel.

Happy Reading!