A few separate incidents from my own life sparked the idea. First, when I was a young child--about five years old--I fell through the ice while icefishing with my uncle. My uncle, fortunately, was able to grab me and pull me out of the water before I slipped beneath the ice. That incident etched itself in my memory, and I can still vividly recall the shock of the icy water as I plunged into the lake.
Second, when I was attending the University of Montana and pursuing my BA in English Literature, one of my many odd jobs was janitor in the University’s Chem/Pharm building. During my time there, I had to clean the cadaver storage room, where cadavers were were wrapped in black plastic that looked very much like garbage bags. One of my fellow workers, a practical joker, wrapped himself in garbage bags one evening and lay on the floor. When the young lady unlucky enough to be cleaning that night came into the room and turned on the lights (it wasn’t my night to clean the cadaver room, thankfully), she was startled to see a cadaver on the floor. She was even more startled when the cadaver sat up.
When I started writing Waking Lazarus, those two images--the boy slipping beneath the ice and drowning, and the body in the morgue sitting up--converged and became a story idea: what if there were a man who has struggled with recurring Near Death Experiences (the technical, but somewhat misleading, term for a person who has died and come back to life)? What kind of person would he be? What might those Near Death Experiences mean?
Download images and other materials; to schedule an interview or event, contact 
