Kerry Wood was a major league pitcher for fourteen seasons, more or less. He was good, too. But he could have been the best that ever played. Because he wasn't, I wrote a book about teenage prostitutes.

Bear with me.

Wood burst onto the scene with the Chicago Cubs in the spring of 1998, a big and baby-faced twenty-year-old with a crazy fastball and the most beautiful 12-to-6 curve I've ever seen. I won't bore you with the fawning that comes over me when I talk about Kerry Wood as he was that spring. Non-baseball fans won't care, and baseball fans already know how special Kerry Wood was. What I will say is that a couple months after his debut, he threw the highest-rated pitching performance ever, and baseball has been around a long, long time. He had so much promise.

Even people who aren't baseball fans probably know where this is going. It was a minor tragedy--nothing like the big ones we see with alarming regularity these days. Wood got hurt. And then he got hurt again. And again. Fourteen times in fourteen major league seasons. He was still a good pitcher, but all that promise, all that sparkling possibility that we saw in 1998, never came to pass.

It made me sad then. It makes me sad now. Kerry Wood was special. And then he wasn't. How does one cope when all their promise is swept away, through no fault of their own?

The answer, if I'd been looking at it as a human being and not as a rabid Cubs fan who only saw the legend he lost out on, is that Kerry Wood's life was never a tragedy to him.

He had a long big-league career. He played in the postseason. His last appearance took place where he'd started, in Chicago, as a Cub. To a standing ovation, he walked off the baseball field with his young son in his arms.

He has a lovely family, a job with the Cubs, and an active charitable foundation. He is grateful for the career he had, not filled with sadness over the one he could have had.

His life wasn't screwed up. The lens through which I viewed it was.

A long time after I had that realization, I started writing the story that would become Dry Run. I had this vague vision of a character being chased by someone, but why he or she was being chased was a mystery. Around the same time, for another project, I read an article about homeless youth and their attitudes toward sex. Joe, the hero of Dry Run, started to come into focus.

I wavered, though. A nineteen-year-old prostitute isn't your typical book hero. By necessity, if you're writing honestly, the world he inhabits is going to be pretty stark. The world that sprang up around Joe certainly is. 

People might read the blurb or the first scene and think, "My God, this is too dark." Some people will probably put the book down, and that's okay; it's not for everyone. But more than losing a reader or two, I didn't want to write something that exploited my characters or the real-life people in similar situations. I wanted to tell Joe's story honestly, without flinching, but without pity, too. Just like Kerry Wood, Joe doesn't view his life as a tragedy, and I would have been doing all of us a disservice if I'd treated him as if it were.