In the midst of an international health crisis marked by lockdowns, closures and quarantines, Edward Danko turned inward and found another place to spend his time.
Now the 65-year-old Barrie man is a published author.
“Maybe the lockdown was a bit of blessing in disguise; I had the need to create other worlds to get into,” Danko tells BarrieToday.
And now he has the chance to share that other world complete with the characters he’s created with his novel, You Made Me Kill You, released on Amazon earlier this month and currently being distributed to other outlets.
The thriller centres on a man beset by trauma as a child, including being the subject of a neighbourhood bully and exposure to a bad babysitter, which continues to haunt him.
So he sets out on a path of vengeance to ensure his ghosts pay for their misdeeds two decades earlier.
The story then weaves in police detectives probing the resulting murders and follows the main character as he eludes their grasp.
It’s Danko’s hope that readers will connect and identify with his main character, Danny Rosen.
Danko, a retired retail jeweller, has long been writing, transitioning from poetry to penning children’s books after his children were born.
He continued with the children’s genre and secured an agent who was shopping around a half dozen of his manuscripts.
But then he decided to try his hand at a novel and when he sent the finished product to a publisher a year ago, he had a positive response.
After acceptance, Danko went through a learning experience as Made Me Kill You went through the entire publishing process including editing, cover design and all the elements that led to its printing.
“I was quite surprised. I thought my debut book was going to be in the children’s genre,” he says.
Encouraged, he has already written a sequel that is in the publisher’s hands.
Meanwhile, he has also written a science fiction novel and has embarked upon writing a sequel to it as well.
“With being locked down and isolation... it certainly gave me inspiration to keep myself busy,” says Danko, who has three grown children and a granddaughter. “It’s kind of a lifetime, main goal I’ve had probably for the past 30 or 40 years or so.
“I stuck with it.”
