Back Story of Jen-Zen and the One Shoe Diaries

In Southern California I noticed flip flops and running shoes left behind on the beach, the freeways, construction sites and parking lots and felt this uncanny urge propelling me to write about them. I couldn’t escape them, nor the unshakable sadness and loss I felt emanating from the shoes themselves.

Why singular shoes I kept asking myself? Is it a Cinderella complex?  Is this a poem I should write or a short story? I wrote them all and then one pivotal day I remembered a time as a teenager when my friends and I played with a Ouija board and a shoe moved by itself. It was this big aha moment! Of course, the shoes are haunted. Why didn’t I see it before? And that’s when I found Brad, my main character, the photographer who chronicled the shoes in the wake of his girlfriend’s uncertain death. In the singular shoes he saw, Jen-Zen, the eternal soul mate. He relived their love affair in search of answers as to why she died.

Brad snapped pictures of the shoes and tried to say goodbye and get on with his life, but he couldn’t...the very shoes started to tell him something.  When outsiders called his photographic odyssey nuts and others wanted to capitalize on it Brad believed most of all in his gut instinct telling him…there’s a message in the shoes…just believe…believe in yourself.

I identified with Brad..pursuing a dream and love, no matter what. Even if his Grandma told him, “Intuition is a fool’s wobble and you got the wobble all right!”

Like Brad, I listen to my intuition. So it didn’t seem out of the ordinary when in the midst of searching for a publisher that a real life photographer, Randall Louis Hamilton contacted me and mentioned having a shoe photo collection. Guess what he called it? It’s the One Shoe Diaries, like the original name of my novel.

My novel is not Randy’s life story. It just captured his artistic vision somehow and some way. From two separate coasts we each shared this unifying vision, albeit independently. Neither one of us knew about the other's work or the many parallels that existed between us. Simultaneously in Florida where Randy lives and in Southern California where I live, a fascination with the "one shoe sightings" emerged. We each wondered about the untold story of the singular shoes. I imagined a table top book of the shoe photos to go along with the novel; the very photographic collection Randy is amassing. Randy also imagined people sharing stories about “singular shoe sightings” as in my novel.

When we hung up the phone from that pivotal day both of us felt like we’d stumbled into the Twilight Zone, proving that life sometimes is stranger than fiction. It validated for me that intuition is anything but a fool’s wobble, that is, once you set it straight. It's a lesson Brad and Jen-Zen learn in my novel and one which continues to surprise and amaze me in everyday life.