Author’s Reflection


Writing a novel such as this is never a simple undertaking. It is not a matter of arranging words on paper or typing until the hours wear themselves down. It is a matter of entering into a world that does not exist except in the faint lines of imagination and then breathing life into that world until it can stand upright before you. When one begins such a story - this story - there is little sense of where it will truly end. Characters arrive as fragments of thought, perhaps a name, a whispered line of dialogue, or even a fleeting image glimpsed in my dreams. Yet with time, those fragments harden into presence. They begin to demand their place, their stories, their truths.
This book began with the idea of the haunting weight of memory and how it can be shaped, stolen, or redeemed. It questions what happens when memories are no longer solely our own, especially when manipulated by unseen forces. This led to the creation of Echo Stone, a man whose ambitions focus on possessing human lives through the theft of memory. Opposing him is Samantha Timberwolf, an unlikely hero who survives and testifies, refusing to let silence cage her.
Writing Samantha was perhaps the most difficult task of this entire journey. How does one give voice to pain without exploiting it? How does one tell the story of captivity and loss without collapsing into despair? I knew from the beginning that she could not be written as a mere victim. She had to have depth, agency, and a resilience that did not erase her wounds but transformed them into a family strength. That is the delicate balance of writing characters scarred by trauma: they must remain human, imperfect, vulnerable, yet undeniably strong in their survival.
The courtroom became the final crucible of this story and my writing. A trial is more than law; it is a theater of memory and morality. Each testimony is a story, and every witness narrates their own truth. In crafting the courtroom scenes, I aimed for r