Richmond’s Michael Seidelman loves a page-turner — the kind of book packed with cliff hangers that leaves you craving to know what happens next and simply cannot be put down.
That’s what he aimed to produce with his first book, No One Dies in the Garden of Syn, which debuted April 26.
But he’s not stopping there. He’s quit his job as an online marketer so he can spend the next year compiling part two of what will ultimately be a young adult-focused trilogy.
“Writing, it’s something I’ve always enjoyed doing,” Seidelman, 39, said. “But it wasn’t until high school, when I was assigned to write a short story, that I realized it was something I was passionate about — and was good at.
“And as soon as I graduated, I continued writing. I never stopped.”
But it wasn’t just a love of writing that Seidelman enjoyed. He took great pleasure in reading the stories to classmates.
“My stories have a lot of twists and shocks in them and I liked watching the reaction people had when I was telling them,” he said.
In No One Dies in the Garden of Syn, Seidelman is hoping readers will enjoy the undulating storyline in his self-published, fictional effort that centres around a 16-year-old girl, Synthia (Syn) Wade, who struggles with cystic fibrosis, an incurable, potentially life-threatening disease.
Characterized as The Fault in Our Stars meets Alice in Wonderland, Seidelman’s tale follows Syn’s experience as she is pushed by an unseen figure into her back garden pond only to wake up afterwards in a new world with a mysterious garden where illness and death no longer exist.
“For years I’ve wanted to create an Alice in Wonderland type of secret world story, but make it more grown up and mature than what else was out there,” said the McNair secondary grad who first developed his love for story writing while attending the school district’s Incentive School Program for grades 9 and 10.
“In my head I can see all my stories as a movie,” Seidelman said, explaining his writing process is very visually based as he maps out the action.
He chose to focus on cystic fibrosis as his main character’s ailment because he wanted to shed light on what is a somewhat little known disease, which, according to Cystic Fibrosis Canada, is the most common fatal genetic disease affecting Canadian children and young adults. It affects the digestive system and lungs and is incurable.
“It wasn’t the obvious cancer, something that pretty much everyone is familiar with. I thought it would be good to go with something, that if the book became part of a successful series, it could benefit those with cystic fibrosis,” Seidelman said.
To that end, he is donating 10 per cent of book sales in May, which is Cystic Fibrosis Month, to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.
Another inspiration for incorporating cystic fibrosis into the story was the film Alex, The Life of a Child, which followed the true-life battle of Alexandra Deford, the eight-year-old daughter of former Sports Illustrated writer Frank Deford, who eventually succumbed to the disease in 1980.
“I’m a big movie fan and that made an impression on me,” Seidelman said, adding books were also a big inspiration for developing his writing style.
“Probably the first mystery/thriller that I read was And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie. It was the sort of book you just couldn’t put down,” Seidelman said. “I will always write stories where the characters are central, but I always enjoy wanting to know what happens next.”
No One Dies in the Garden of Syn is available on-line at Amazon.ca.
