Matt: Can you give us a plot outline of your novel The Last Page?

Brian: The Last Page is a tale about the intersecting lives, values and experiences of four people who seem like strangers and polar opposites, yet their lives are more deeply intertwined than they can possibly imagine.

There's a barista named Karen who prides herself on observing others acutely without ever getting to know them or allowing anyone to get close to her; an emotionally-distant father named Jack who doesn't know there's a problem with his relationship with his daughter; a devout Christian named Connie who is stricken with cancer; and a trust fund kid named Travis who sits in the same coffee shop all day long, typing furiously, never saying a word to anyone.

Months have gone by and as far as anyone at The Coffee Cove is concerned, Travis is a mute who loves sucking down endless cups of coffee. At this point, Karen decides she is going to engage him in some sort of conversation. Once she does this, a chain reaction begins, bringing the lives of these four people together in unimaginable ways.

Did your own coffee shop experiences shape the story? And what sets this story apart, in your mind, from others in the genre?

They did in a backhanded sort of way. I still laugh at the fact this novel takes place in a coffee shop because I don't even drink the stuff! (Laughs). But I've always enjoyed going to coffee shops to meet with friends, shoot the breeze and the like. When I lived in Washington there was a Starbucks in Tacoma I sometimes went to with friends just to kill an hour while waiting for a table at Red Lobster. The place always had this warmth to it that I gravitated towards. I could just relax there and have a good conversation with people.

So a part of me went into creating this world that Travis--the enigmatic silent writer in The Last Page--begins to inhabit in the story. It's a place of refuge for him, somewhere he can plug into an energy all his own without having to be dragged down by the world around him. But whereas a Starbucks is a sort of gathering place for me, it's the opposite for Travis because it's where he goes to get away from everything, so I had to take my own experiences and sort of view them through the lens of someone who doesn't get the same kind of enjoyment out of a coffee shop that I normally do. I consciously tried to take what was common to my experiences and write about Travis from the opposite end of the spectrum.

Most any writer will tell you their story is different from a host of others like it because they want to impress you. "Oh, I can assure you it's more than just a suspense story because it's a sci-fi love story too," and all that sort of thing. A novel doesn't have to be this big, sweeping epic thing that encompasses all these facets of life and takes a thousand pages to write in order for it to be meaningful. Every story can't be The Lord of the Rings. (Laughs). That being said, there is nothing wrong with epic stories. In fact one of the novels I am currently working on would fall into that category, which is exciting for me because apart from it being in a genre I'm not used to writing in - that being fantasy, I also get the chance to really craft an epic storyline.

If you want my completely biased opinion though... (Laughs). What makes this story different from other novels I've read or skimmed through is that it doesn't try to be anything more than it is, because it wouldn't work otherwise. Some stories are simply smaller in scope than others, and a reader has to expect that the author knows what that proper scope for his story should be.

The Last Page is a dramatic novel about love, forgiveness, closure and the redemptive power of second chances. It's simply a tale about intersecting lives and what we choose to do with the situations that introduce themselves to us. The characters are the story, rather than being mere chess pieces in an overarching storyline. It's one of those novels that's high on the human quotient and poses questions we all have to grapple with at some point: What does it mean to really love someone? Can you forgive a person who doesn't deserve it? What do you do with your second chance if you finally receive it?

What about this other fantasy novel you mentioned? What's the story with that one?

The fantasy novel is very different from both The Last Page and the story I am finishing up at the moment. It's mostly been kicking around in my head for the past year while I've been working on drafts of my current novel, but some things are taking shape in the hundred or so pages I have written thus far.

The story centers around a teenage girl who is banished from her village because she has this power she can't control--a power which is strictly forbidden in that town. Magic and any sort of crafting in this world has long been wielded only by women after the destruction men brought to the land, but only then by those at the top of society, since they are believed to be the most responsible with such powers. By all accounts, this girl shouldn't even be able to wield this power, let alone at her age, because she has no connection to the elite levels of society.

There is a secret though, which once revealed will set her on a path toward something she cannot even fathom, to mysteries which will shake the foundation of everything she has ever known, and on a mission she doesn't even know needs to be carried out. Most of the people in her world have no idea what's about to happen, that certain forces are prepared to destroy their world as they know it, that the people they trust are not as trustworthy as they think. The question is what will she do once this destiny is forced upon her: will she face it head-on, or will she crumble under the pressure?

I get goosebumps just thinking about the story because to me it's all such a wild idea that you can create this alternate reality and do anything you want with it--as long as you make sure to stick to the rules you create for yourself. That's one of the beauties of fashioning a story in this genre is there are no limits apart from the ones you set for yourself at the start. It's like that idea of a professor giving you an 'A' on your paper even if he completely disagrees with your ideas and thoughts. Sometimes people are willing to judge your work based on what you present to them and how you back up your claim, rather than on whether or not it fits into their assessment of the subject you are dealing with.

In the fantasy realm, you can establish as much of a history as you want about certain races, lands and the like, and as long as you remember to focus on the story instead of getting lost in the special effects--you know, dragons the size of Madison Square Garden, meteor-sized fireballs straight out of the Final Fantasy video games--as long as you remember to acknowledge the set of constructs which shape the reality you are creating, you can really let your imagination go. It's not merely fanciful creatures with funny names either; your story has a point that some people are going to recognize and hopefully connect with.

I'm getting all worked up just thinking about it, but you know what? I'm not even sure this fantasy novel--or novels, perhaps--is the one I'm most excited about. I have an idea I haven't even begun to flesh out yet but it's been dancing around the edges of my mind for a while. I can't say anything about it just now, but it involves a modern send-up of a story many Christians are familiar with. A friend of mine made an offhanded remark about this idea last year and it just sounded too good to ignore, so I've been letting the idea marinate in my mind ever since.

You made an off-handed remark about another story you are finishing up now. What's that one focused on?

The novel is tentatively called Blindsided and it focuses on the lives of two people who are stuck in the past despite their best efforts not to be. Life has been unkind to them in some pretty big ways, and these experiences have led to some self-destructive behavior that's so subtle they don't even realize what's happening to them.

One of the main characters is a confident, care-free sort who has no trouble with the ladies, and doesn't worry about a whole lot, while the other is a standoffish sort who contents herself with working and not having much of a life outside that. Both of them have secrets which haunt them, and as they get to know each other, events from their respective pasts are going to threaten the course of their relationship.

It deals with some of the themes found in The Last Page: love, redemption and forgiveness being chief among them. How deep does the darkness go within a person when they try to hide from their past, and what happens to that person when they are finally worn down? Do they break, and if so, do they heal? What do we see when we look at ourselves in the mirror? How do we reconcile who we are with who everyone else thinks we are? Can we acknowledge the ugly truth when we see it, and more importantly, can we own up to it when faced with it?

These are things I tend to write about in my novels and short stories. I'm fascinated with the dichotomy of who we are versus who the world thinks we are, because sometimes the two are quite different. And it all gets wrapped up inside one person. There's that struggle within us to want to be that person people perceive us to be, and yet knowing that in some ways we are anything but that person.

Forgiveness and redemption are huge for me, thematically. I don't write stories or novels that are blatantly Christian, but it's hard for my writing not to be influenced by what I have experienced in my walk with God, and if there are two things I have learned in my life, it's that forgiveness and redemption are possible no matter what you've done. It's hard for me not to be inspired by that, and yet it's so hard for me to wrap my mind around those concepts sometimes that I think my stories tend to steer themselves in the direction of those subjects just so I can be reminded of what it means to accept those truths.

Blindsided is a mixture of all these things. It's about love and loss and what it means to feel, about how forgiveness can be so life-altering, about how people aren't always what they seem, about how you must choose whether to stay down or get back up once you've been blindsided by something. I like to think the only time we really fail is when we choose not to get back up. We may stumble, we may sin and we may fall, but we don't truly fail unless we decide not to get back up and fight again.