Young Bermudian author Wallace Lee wanted to express in his first novel, a part of local culture that was not usually visible.

The novel, ?Destiny??, took him three years to write and he has self published the manuscript. The book is currently on sale in several of the Island?s book stores. Mr. Lee said his inspiration for the novel was basic ? boredom.

?I was bored out of my mind and I sat behind my computer and started writing,? he said. ?English was never my favourite subject and it kind of happened.

?I thought let me just pull something together and it just happened. I had to stop and I began writing another one. Then I found that I had two books and I wasn?t sure where my characters were going to go and as a writer you usually don?t know either.

?So it was interesting to see how the story had progressed, especially knowing what I knew when it started and then seeing what I had when I was finished ? it was two completely different things.?

The main characters in the book are Tamieko, Sabrina, Taj, Takia, Tray, Tasha, Jasmine, Lee and then there are the mother and father Gina and John, and the brother, Ian, and his two best friends.

?It ended up getting a little twisted together and then in the end I introduced another main character,? said Mr. Lee.

?It was interesting because all of my characters had interesting lives and played important roles in the book. All 15 of my characters could each have a whole book ? that is how much information that I had on each of them.

?It is difficult to explain to people. In the end there is Gus, who has a son, and then Tiny, whose real name is Fabian.?

Mr. Lee, 22, said the book has no real setting, as such, but it is set somewhere where it snows.

?That is the extent of my setting,? he said. ?I find when people read they always use visuals in their minds and I don?t think it is necessary to give them too many details.

?I believe in giving them all the other stuff and it will conform to anyone?s mind. It will make it more imaginative, as everyone will see it in a different way.?

He said his multicultural people have lots of interracial exchanges.

?The ethnicities range from the half-white, the half-black, Puerto Ricans, Asian, there are Indian, totally black etc.,? he said. ?In Bermuda we can do that all the time ? I can walk down the street and it is just normal, but when I was writing it, it really didn?t occur to me that in certain places there is interracial grouping going on. A lot of Bermudian people relate to it and hopefully others do too.?

The young author said ?Destiny?? was based around a cast of characters who were all teens initially.

He said: ?I didn?t make them in any specific boxes and it was just the way I wanted it. Sometimes if you stick to too many guidelines ? you can question how the book became so complicated. I knew what it was going to be in the end and that was all that mattered. It really got out of control.?

Mr. Lee added that it was essentially a book about Taj and his friends.

?What ended up happening was that in the book someone else ended up becoming my vocal character,? he said. ?And they were just one of the friends and became one of the main characters.

?So I couldn?t name the book after him (Taj), because it didn?t centre around him anymore. It shifted to centre around somebody else and it allowed for other characters to come in, who were linked to the main characters.?

In his opinion he said: ?The book is pretty good and it?s a little racy. It has a little bit of everything right from the first page. I haven?t taken the time to warm up, because that it where people get bored.

?They read the first page and think, I can?t seem to get into it and it doesn?t seem that interesting. I didn?t even realise it was like that, until I sold some of the unedited versions to people, so that they could tell their friends. I was telling so many people and so many people were interested.?

He said the story touches on subjects that are all too often not talked about.

?I figured that all of those things that people say are taboo,? he said. ?Or things that you should not necessarily talk about ? I figured that I would take these teenagers and do all these things that they shouldn?t be doing. Because in real life kids are doing them.

?If everything was okay, then what type of problems would these kids face? Pregnancy and the break-ups, the sex, and homosexuality and what would a good book be without a little bit of that? And then there is a little bit of religion and a twist of magic and that is what catapults the book into the Cato sphere.

?It is ridiculous and they began finding out little bits about themselves and what they meant. Then they not only had to deal with teenage and adult problems, they now had to deal with this twist of magic that came in from nowhere.?

Mr. Lee added that the book was almost called Secrets, because there were so many among his characters.

?After all the secrets, it began to play more on the magical aspects, I couldn?t call it Secrets anymore,? he said. ?So it turned out that there was this whole figurative plan going on and there was just a question mark of whether everything was leading up to this point ? or was it just destiny.

?It is a twist of destiny as to whether things would have happened this way or not. Once I finally finished the book, I could come up with one solid thing ? Destiny.?

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