Although The Winter Family is my first published novel, I've written at least eight others that were never published. Back in high school, I was interested in science fiction and fantasy, and I started several projects in that area. I finished my first novel when I was 21 years old — it was a fantasy novel set in a world with two different races that were fighting each other. My next novel was also fantasy. Then I wrote a historical novel about Jack the Ripper. And I wrote different books throughout my twenties. At this time I didn't show my work to anyone; I didn't submit anything for publication. I just wrote them and put them in a drawer.

Eventually, I decided I wanted to write something that would get published. My first idea was to write a novel about the CIA's drug dealings in Nicaragua in the 1980s — I didn't finish it. I figured the problem was that I wasn't writing from what I knew, so I decided to write what I did know, which was being a lawyer in Toronto because that's what I was doing at the time. But before I did I took a break and wrote a short story called "Oklahoma, 1891" about a band of outlaws. Then I started working on the more marketable novel and I did finish it, but it was a slough. By the time I finished, I knew I hadn't written a good novel, again. As you can imagine, I was a bit dispirited because I'd written numerous books that weren't very good.

So I decided to take a break and I wrote some more short stories set in the same world as "Oklahoma, 1891." Eventually, I wrote four more stories and suddenly realized that I had put together a book that was more marketable than I realized. I met an agent, and the book found a publisher, and the rest is history.