Credit where it is due.

If not for Timothy Zahn, I would probably not be a writer today. If not for his Heir To the Empire trilogy, My book probably wouldn't exist.

When I was kid, I was, like most little boys, nuts for anything Star Wars. I had tons of the action figures toy X-wings, TIE fighters, Y-wings even Slave I and the Millennium Falcon. My obsession didn't stop there either, with Return of the Jedi bedsheets and various other little childhood memories that lines George Lucas' pockets.

I remember making little Star Wars sequels starring those toys with my buddy Dan and a PXL-2000 in the back yard. A flooded drainage ditch was Dagobah. The weeds along the fence where we stood the Ewok Village play set was the Forest Moon of Endor. Earthworms and crawdads were horrible space monsters that menaced our intrepid action figure heroes. I even had a Endor Rebel trooper and a Boba Fett, whose heads popped off, that always managed to get decapitated by a lightsaber in those little movies.

Then, when I was 12, I felt like I should be growing out of those toys for boys. I packed most of my Star Wars stuff into boxes and put it in the attic. That same year, my mother took us on the yearly family vacation to Florida. She absolutely loved to eat at the Cracker Barrel. My brother, my sister and I, however, did not. It always turned into a fight. First, Mom would ask us if we wanted to eat at the next Cracker Barrel. We would all say no. Then Mom would get mad, scream at us to stop whining and we'd wind up eating at the Cracker Barrel anyway, taking an hour long pit-stop on what could have been a sixteen hour trip. Between my mom and my sister and their frequent pit stops, one of those trips between Evansville and Daytona actually took three days.

It was on one of those pit stops that I loathed, that I found myself browsing the gift shop at a Cracker Barrel. Not because I wanted to, but because my sister demanded that we look around. I think my little sister wasn't truly happy unless she was inconveniencing as many people as possible. While I was wandering around, moaning and moping, huffing and puffing, a Star Wars logo jumped out from a rack at me.

It was the cover of Dark Force Rising. At the time, I didn't know who Timothy Zahn was, I was a 12 year old boy, and I didn't read much outside of school. I was far more interested in riding my bike, video games and getting to Florida where I could spend a few days playing in the surf and sand and riding rides at Disney World, before being confined to Grandma's house for the last few days of the trip.

But here was a book-on-tape that I could pop into my walkman and listen to during that extremely long road trip. I would not have to listen to my sister whining, my brother deafening himself with Pantera or Metallica or whatever it was he had blaring on his own walkman. So I dug into my pocket and bought it. So the rest of the trip in the back of mom's Delta 88 was surprisingly pleasant. On the the return trip I picked up the other two books from the Thrawn Trilogy, and Dark Force Rising turned out to be a very wise investment, because Grandma snored...loud enough to be heard throughout her entire house. The headphones and Anthony Daniel's narration helped me block out enough of it to actually sleep those last few days.

About a month after that summer vacation, I wrote my first sci-fi epic. It was a blatant rip-off and had all the depth and complexity that a twelve year old boy could muster. Needless to say it was horrible. I wrote it out by hand in a half-used notebook from the previous school year. I still have it. A few years later, at 15, I began writing my first full length novel. I finished it by the time I finished my first year of college. It, too was horrible. I also wrote a 90-pages screenplay for a class taught by Patti Aakhus at the University of Southern Indiana. It was a little better. In the interceding years I had numerous false starts and I have page after page of half-formed ideas to show for it. Then, I started writing what became Never Saw It Coming. Tim Finnegan, Renee Williams, Maggie Gomez and even the Reverend Father Jonathan Blake became as real to me as Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, Mara Jade and Grand Admiral Thrawn.

I loved them, I hated them and I killed a few of them. The process of writing hurt, led me to go to work tired and spent, to skip classes and forget plans with friends. I would not trade it for anything in the world. It had to be done.

I never would have thought to put pen to paper without first hearing, then reading Timothy Zahn's foray into the Star Wars Universe. I have trouble believing it has been twenty years since he guided me on my 'first step into a larger world'.

I can only hope that my stories have the same effect on someone out there.