'The Price of Friendship' was my first completed and published novel. It grew out of a prompt from The Great Hites podcast. The prompt was "A pound of flesh" from the 'Merchant of Venice'. I thought the story would go one way and end after about 5000 words. But as I got into it, it went a totally different way. I did the first few episodes on Great Hites, and then Justin Lowmaster suggested I participate in the "Something International Podcast" that ran every day in 2010. I was writing very 'organically' without thinking much about where the story was going.
In 2011 I decided I needed to finish something and decided that story was most complete. It ended with just over 50,000 words and pretty rough, compared to what I have learned since. But it is what it is, my first published novel and is available on podiobooks.com in 16 audio episodes.