So I’m on the Wheaton Campus, attending the Write To Publish Conference in June 2004, trying to decide if I was a writer or if I had written a novel.

I took the continuing class on fiction writing taught by James Scott Bell. I took good notes. I still remember a lot of what Bell said, especially his thoughts on dialog. Sitting in that class, as well as in some others, ideas began to come to me for other writing projects.

The first was some more ideas for In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. The second editor I met with was not interested in Doctor Luke’s Assistant. Bible-era novels don’t sell very well, he said, with there being a limited audience for the genre. His publishing house already had its “stable” of writers for the genre, with no openings for new ones. He asked, “What else do you have?” I told him about a political novel that had crossed through my mind, but which wasn’t well developed. He said no, he wasn’t interested, but added, “What else are you working on?” I told him about FTSP; he said he was interested and that I should send him the first three chapters whenever I had them done.

So I began to more seriously think about this baseball novel, and how to work Mafia influence into it. Bell spoke a lot about conflict in his class, so I was thinking about how to develop more conflict.

At the same time, I had been thinking about my overseas travels and how to work them into books. Through the years I’ve read about people—politicians, writers, royalty—who had made the “grand tour” around the world to gain perspective for their life work. I was disappointed that I couldn’t make such a grand tour to enhance my writing. Then I realized: I did make the grand tour. I lived overseas for five years and visited more than 30 countries. I just did it before I ever thought of being a writer, and so needed to pull from memory those things I needed to enhance my writing.

In my dorm room in the evenings, after putting down some ideas or some actual words for FTSP, I began work on a mental sketch of a novel. Or, I should say of a plot. Or, I should say, of going through our expatriate life and travels, and trying to decide if there was anything in those times that could form the nucleus of a novel.

There were years of living in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Would American readers care about that? Based on the total lack of interest by Americans we interacted with in the years after returning to the States, I thought not. We had some good travels in Europe in 1982, our first real travel adventure after moving to Saudi Arabia. But except for one train mix-up nothing really came to mind.

Our second long trip out of Saudi Arabia was our round-the-world trip to Asia in 1983. Hong Kong, China, the Philippines, and Thailand, for a total of 30 days. Surely something from that trip would be good at the nucleus of a plot. And it came to me. I began to focus on China, as I’ll explain in the next post.