It's All True...Except for the Parts I made Up

When readers find out my book Revelation, book one of my Almost Human series, contains Bigfoot encounters, someone will ask if I've seen one. A Bigfoot, that is. Many of them have Bigfoot encounter stories of their own.

Talking about Bigfoot is kind of like talking about UFO's or evolution. There are so many anecdotal accounts and personal experiences that sound convincing, and have certainly convinced the person involved, and although there is scant and questionable evidence for any of them, can we in all good conscience dismiss them all as fantasy?

In Revelation, Michelle not only has a brief brush with a Bigfoot, she actually...but, no that would spoil her story.

Fiction often has its roots in actual events. The locations in Revelation are really there, I've been there and wandered them. I've traipsed across the lava rocks at Yaquina Head and wandered the Interpretive Center. I've been snagged by countless blackberry brambles that grow among the forest undergrowth, followed a stream through the forest, and spent hours meandering deserted beaches discovering human and ocean-discarded creatures, flotsam, and jetsam. I've even run across apparently abandoned seal pups on the sand.

Bigfoot?

Yes, I took the photo, no, it's not Photoshopped, and yes, apparently he was having a bad hair day.

One sunny August afternoon near Rocky Creek Park, I maneuvered my way through the tangled brush on a steep incline. Off to my left, I heard a tremendous splintering crash followed by three thuds, as if something heavy broke through a tree trunk and rolled down the hill. The bushes were so closely grown, I couldn't see what made the noise, until I crawled under a Salal bush to the other side of the leafy screen. Right there, in a small clearing, jammed up against the border of coastal pines lay a huge boulder. What kind of creature had the strength to push a boulder that size down the hill? And where did it go after it pushed the boulder?

It might have been a Bigfoot.