That’s a photo of me on my wedding day, at an Italian restaurant, with my wife Nancy. The year was 2000, and yes, the bottle of Italian red on our table was that big. Nancy is also a writer, and so we decided to do a fun “dreaming of the future” pose in which love and happiness and “what you will” was the gauzy dream. At that moment, sitting there on a wet September night in Vancouver, Canada, my “what you will” dream was that together we would go on a grand adventure to create life and art and happiness.

And so we have. Four years almost to the day after that photo was taken, our daughter Rosalind was born, and yes, she is named for our favorite character in Shakespeare. Four years after Rose (as she calls herself) came into the world, we moved to New York City. I was doing work here, Nancy is American (and Canadian), and Rose was about to start school. We had dreamed of living in this city, and so we set sail.

And now, more than two decades on from that photo, Rose is a Manhattan high school senior applying to college, and Nancy and I have just finished writing together the first in a trilogy of thriller novels. We are producing a film together, and a series of children’s books. We are still on the grand adventure, and still dreaming of what we can do next.

That is my philosophy, as a person and as a writer. Once you have the dream, then let it inspire you to take action to make it real. It might not always work out the way that you dreamt, but taking the chance to put your dream out there in the world-- be it a story, or a film, or a painting, or a play, or a song --is the only way you’re ever going to know if your dream comes true. And the best thing of all is that it might come true in a way that is like a whole new dream, taking you on another new and grand adventure.