As you can probably tell from the artwork — it's not the worst you've ever seen, but it's not the work of a professional comic book artist either. For many years, that's exactly what I was trying to become. I had half a dozen comic books published — a few that I wrote myself — and my art did improve over time. But breaking into that world is a long, humbling road, and a foothold in that career was always just out of reach.

And like everybody who did comics in the early 2000s, I had a few of my properties shopped around Hollywood. One series I did the artwork for even got optioned — though, as these things tend to go, nothing ever came of it.

With that said, I'm genuinely glad to have found my way to writing. I've always been a storyteller at heart. Sequential art drew me in first — there's something powerful about telling a story panel by panel, image by image. But over time, I fell deeply in love with literary prose. Finding a character through the words on the page, building a world sentence by sentence — it's a different craft entirely, and one I've come to cherish.

Writing a novel is nothing like writing a comic book. The pacing is different, the interiority is different, the relationship between writer and reader is different. But there's something deeply fitting — almost poetic — about the fact that one of the very first ideas I ever had, conceived as a scrappy photocopied comic at nineteen years old, is now the story I'm bringing to the pages of my first novel.

What began as panels and ink has become something I never could have imagined back then. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

One addition that was not part of my original concept was the character of Romulus — and he deserves his own mention. Romulus is based on my Cane Corso, who passed away a few years ago while I was writing the first draft of this novel. It's only fitting that he is so prominently woven into the story. If you read the book, you'll see — he's always there. Just like he was in life.

Every single day, we started our morning the same way — up at five in the morning, out the door for a mile and a half walk, rain or shine. Sometimes we were up in the mountains. Sometimes just on a sidewalk. It didn't matter. We always started our day the same way, just the two of us. That was our ritual, and it was sacred.

Romulus still is my best friend — and always will be. It's hard to put into words how great of a companion he was. I still think he's with me. And honestly, he is — he's definitely still with me inside the pages of this novel. He is the heart of Nico Shaw, just like he was the heart of me. There's something a dog can teach you about yourself that nothing else can. The loyalty, the presence, the way they show up for you every single day without condition — it changes you. It changed me.

I now have two other dogs that I absolutely love. But nothing will ever replace Romulus. He was the inspiration not only for the character, but for my publishing house as well. Romulus Press carries his name for a reason. He earned it.