Many of you have heard my backstory about Hardscrabble Road: I spent ten years writing down the brutal, often horrifying, but always compelling childhood stories of my former father-in-law—who was “Bud,” if you’ve read the book and the sequel Return to Hardscrabble Road—and his two older brothers and older sister. When I approached Bud about helping me shape those stories into a novel by sharing his sensory memories of those bygone days, he told me not to waste my time because no one would care. That opinion was an informed one:

No one cared enough to stop his psychopathic father from beating and terrorizing Bud and his brothers.

No one cared when Papa tried to murder Bud’s mother (even the court barely cared, sentencing the horrible man to just a few years in prison).

No one cared (except for Bud’s favorite teacher) when he and his brothers dropped out of school one by one to work in a sawmill and do predawn bread deliveries to feed their family and keep a rented roof over their heads.

I cared, though, and I finally convinced him to help me. I finished writing Hardscrabble Road twenty years ago and sent it to my agent, who was excited to have something new of mine to send to the big publishers. She couldn’t get anyone to care about my first novel, The Five Destinies of Carlos Moreno, but thought this one would resonate.

But Bud was right: no one cared. We didn’t get a publishing contract for Hardscrabble, Five Destinies, or my domestic drama The Caretaker. I eventually fired that agent and focused on helping other writers on their journeys.

A chance meeting with a small, local publisher resulted in Hardscrabble Road being published in 2012. And you know what? Individual readers cared. Book clubs cared. Most of the 5,000+ people who’ve left reviews online for the book since then cared. Bud didn’t survive long enough to see the book in print (that’s him on the cover in 1936, holding out a can of worms to his middle brother), but I hope he knows that people cared.

And somehow, twelve years, six more books, and two more publishers since then, Hardscrabble continues to be the one that outsells all my other titles combined. My wife, author Kim Conrey, and I just did a signing at the beautiful Poe & Co. Bookstore in Milton, GA, which displayed all my books, but which one did I sell? You guessed it. We’ll go to DragonCon in a few weeks, where sci-fi and fantasy rule, but my satirical pre-apocalyptic comedy Offlining tailored for that audience probably won’t sell as well as the Southern, historical gothic Hardscrabble.

What’s the moral of all this? If you have a story in you and you’re telling yourself not to bother writing it because no one will care, think again. If you want to tell stories from your own life to family or friends so they’ll understand you better, but you haven’t done so because you don’t think they’ll care, think again. If you haven’t shared your views or your news on social media because who would care, think again.

Bud was a brilliant man and, I imagine, the most resilient, optimistic child who ever picked cotton and hoed peanuts from dark-thirty to dark-thirty. He once told me, “There’s nothing stranger than people, and you’ll never understand them,” because of the terrible man and disinterested woman who raised him and the various odd characters he encountered in his adult life. Clearly, though, he didn’t understand readers and couldn’t imagine their affinity for his childhood tale, but I’ve witnessed it first-hand for a dozen years and counting. And readers are now telling me they enjoy Return to Hardscrabble Road even more because Bud is coming into his own and has agency (he’s on the far right on that cover).

So, tell or write your story. Don’t be afraid to share it. You just might be surprised who will care.