Author Jason Wood Releases His Latest Novel FROM FIGHTING TO FORGIVING

Jason Wood knows how to tell a story, and he tells it well. Jason believes the best stories, the most interesting, terrifying, horrible, funny, gut retching, and hart-warming stories, emerge straight from the muck of real life. His latest novel is a real life drama that pulses like fiction.

Jason´s fist novel, From Here to Half Moon Bay, a three-part saga, proved to the world that he had no trouble telling it like it was. The novel was born out of a spontaneous obsession Jason had, to track down his birth parents. From Here to Half Moon Bay began as a heartfelt letter, and turned into a thirty-day tell-all burst of prose. Most of us would be terrified to bear all our secrets to the world, but Jason met this fear head on.

Jason Wood´s new book, From Fighting to Forgiving has extended beyond the author´s own turmoil and centers around the harrowing story of the Gough family, and the shocking execution of their young teenage son. Wood wrote his first book much like Jack Kerouac created On the Road, in one large surge of enlightened energy. Jason´s muse smacked him in the head with a large, mythical baseball bat and he woke up to hundreds of pages of brutally honest script. On the flip side Fighting to Forgiving was done methodically. Jason spent several months learning everything he could about the family´s history, and what the world was and had become to them. Due to Wood's high popularity among the Latin community the book has been translated into Spanish. Jason is trying to maintain the integrity of the story by using the most common of the various Spanish dialects.

In 2004 at Southwood Middle School in Miami Florida, fourteen-year-old Jaime Gough was brutally murdered by his best friend, Michael Hernandez. Wood´s book provides a real-time account of the devastation surrounded by the event, as well as an in- depth look into the lives of the people involved.

Jason does not mince words. ¨I wanted that murderer to suffer as much as he made Jaime suffer. I talked about hiring someone to go into the jail and make him suffer. I wanted Michael to feel instant justice.¨ Through the spiritual insight of Jaime´s mother and father, Jason learned the power of forgiveness. According to Jason, forgiveness is something precious that only you can give to yourself, for yourself.

Jason Wood is truly an easy individual to talk to. He does not feign interest when speaking to someone; on the contrary he listens attentively, and provides his honest feedback. If he does not agree with someone´s statement, he makes it known without detracting from that person´s opinion.

To provide a summary of Jason´s life would be impossible. One could say that he is an enigma as well as a nomad. Although he currently resides in Miami, there is no telling where he will end up next, and what new story will come out of it. Jason is yacht-broker by day and a storyteller by calling. His new novel, Fighting to Forgiving, provides a painstakingly true representation of one family´s journey through the darkness of the human condition.

-brett miller