I love this story. It’s an adventure, it’s a love story, it’s a mystery, it’s a fantasy, and it’s a thriller. I began writing The Point of Impact in the late 1990s when I worked as a trainer for Chi-Chi’s Mexican Restaurant. I brought the first ten pages to work with me and a couple of employees were genuinely interested in the work. So, every week or so I would show up at work with another chapter, my readers weren’t shy about their enthusiasm for the story, and the next thing I knew I had amassed about a hundred and forty pages of material. 

I realized at that point that I had the makings of a novel on my hands. Motivated by the positive reception the story had garnered, I made the decision to shelve the project and go back to school. That’s when I enrolled in the English program at Kent State University, and this book is why I did it. 

After completing three years of courses the opportunity arose to complete The Point of Impact as a three-semester thesis project. I had an incredible committee of three professors from the English department and one from the Philosophy department. The experience was something that I will cherish for the rest of my life.

As a way of saying thank you to my committee for all of the time and work they put into the project, I formatted the book, designed the cover, printed four copies using Amazon’s Direct Printing service, and after I completed my defense, I gave those copies as gifts to my committee. That is where I went wrong.

I learned afterward, when I began my quest for representation, that no literary agent is interested in representing and trying to shop a previously self-published work. And, I know the question, “Does four copies really count?” Unfortunately, yes. Going through the steps it took to produce those four copies constitutes self-publishing. So, thoroughly disgusted and defeated, with a grand total of four copies sold, I gave up writing fiction for ten years. 

That is the terrible story of why The Point of Impact was never submitted for representation.