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When anyone asks which of your books is your favorite, there is, for me, only one honest answer. This one. The latest. As I write this post, my clothes are tumbling through some cycle or other in the dryer, the iron is heating up, and my suitcase is open on the bed. I’m leaving first thing tomorrow on a promotion tour. There will be a bunch of readings, signings, interviews. What’s my favorite book? THE UNINVITED. It’s all I’m going to be talking about for the next while.

Which is kind of nice, really. Writing is something you do mostly on your own, a solitary business. It’s good to be talking to people about it. It’s good to get it out in the open. When you’re writing a book, you are immersed in it. The story becomes an alternate reality: the place where you live a good part of every day (and sometimes half the night!). The characters become your best friends. When it’s finally finished, it’s a little hard to let go, say goodbye.

And the weird thing is that this intense relationship, this friendship with these imaginary friends, all begins with an idea or two clanging around in your head. A few choice “what if” kinds of moments. In fact, in the case of THE UNINVITED, it all began with a single word; a word I’d never heard before.

“You’re moving to the what?”

“The snye.”

“What’s a snye?”

Well, it turns out a snye is a secret little stream that slips away from a river and cuts its own path around a series of rapids. “Snye” is the word the folks around here call such a waterway. It’s not in most dictionaries. I love that!

When I saw the house my friend was going to fix up, I wanted it for myself. There it sat, in the middle of nowhere, nestled under willow trees, on the banks of this sly little stream, reached by a broken bridge. I totally coveted it! It was such a magic place: a place where surprising things could happen. What if you were running away from something or someone? What if you got here and found that you were being watched? Hmmm.

Yes. I could definitely do things with this place. Oh, don’t get me wrong; I didn’t want to live there, not exactly. But I did want to inhabit the place. What I mean is that for me, it was the perfect setting for a story.

I often start a story with a place. That’s not as odd as it sounds. I know theater friends who discover a good stage: an old ruin of a mill, or a decrepit factory, and suddenly the ideas start to flow. They begin to imagine actors on that stage. It’s the same for a writer, sometimes. In fact, if you read THE UNINVITED, you’ll probably realize that the snye isn’t just the setting; it’s more like one of the characters. It always seems to be watching, listening, waiting. What’s going on in that little house? Who is that hiding in those woods?

For Jackson Page, who’s just finished his music degree, the little cabin is a place to compose in. It’s quiet; there’s no one around to bother him. That’s what he thinks, anyway. He’s got a studio there, his instruments and computers. For Mimi Shapiro, running away from a disastrous first year at NYU and a relationship that went way bad, the snye in the wilds of Eastern Ontario is a perfect hideaway. That’s what she thinks. Her father owns the place though he hasn’t been there in many years. A lot has happened since her father was last around.

There’s a third person drawn to the house like a magnet. Kramer Lee. He has problems all his own. He’s taken to spying on Jay. And then along comes Mimi and everything changes. The thing is, all three of them share more in common than any one of them knows.

That’s the story the snye led me to write. To me, writing is a journey of discovery. I never know where I’m going when I first set out. You think you’re writing about one thing and it turns out you’re writing about all sorts of other things, too. I’m just so glad to have been given the gift of that sly little word “snye.” I’m so glad I paddled my canoe up that mysterious stream right into the heart of this story.

-- Tim Wynne Jones