“Normal never did nothing. Weird makes things happen.”
That’s a line from my debut novel Golden Boy. It popped into my head the moment I learned that Smack Dab in the Middle’s theme for 2026 is superhero qualities, because it highlights an underlying theme in my book: So often when we’re following our bliss, everyone else thinks we’re just weird.
Golden Boy is about a young teen named Emma who lives is a small town in the Carolina Lowcountry. Emma’s bliss is science. She loves devouring as many books on biology and cosmology and physics and statistics as she can find in the library, using her knowledge to care for the animals on her family’s farm, and spending down time with her only friend Hudson, her golden retriever. To everyone else in town, though, Emma is just weird.
I know Emma’s predicament from personal experience. Like Emma, I had very few friends when I was young. I was awkward with people, painfully skinny, and wore thick glasses. Both of my parents worked, so I was one of those latchkey kids who got myself home from school and was on my own all afternoon until they came home around six or seven. There were no role models in my life to show me how to relate to people. All I had were books and the TV and my imagination.
And my dog.
My dog rested his head in my lap when I read or watched TV. And he became my copilot when I flew off to destroy the Death Star, a centipede when I was rolling around inside a giant peach, and my faithful sidekick helping to stop a runaway train. He always played his part perfectly.
