After reading our novel, which was based on our ultimate road trip, best-selling author, Clive Cussler, said this about my wife, Nancy, and me: "Anybody who likes wild drives with fast cars through the Rockies and who adorns mystery and intrigue with ancient glyphs can't be all bad." He could also have included the fact that the "wild drive through the Rockies" was accomplished in a Lexus IS300.

We purchased our first Lexus in 2000, but it was parked in our garage when this adventure first started. On the other side of the world in Papua, New Guinea, we were exploring an old village in the highlands with an archeologist from Australia, and there we found and recovered a fantastic museum-quality wooden scepter. Sailing home from that trip, we began to think about the possibility of writing a novel about an average couple who discover an artifact of real historical significance. We realized that this scepter never was the kind of thing that would make a reader turn the pages in anticipation, but it was the reason that we first thought about writing.

In 2002 I was racing on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, and there I dreamed up the idea of a crystal skull buried in the salt. It would be 1000 years old, and would have ancient prophecies encoded within it. The skull would be called, The Stonecypher pure fiction, but the kind of artifact that would make a novel reader turn the pages.

Nancy picked me up in her little silver IS300 at Bonneville following my week of racing. We had planned on doing the ultimate road trip after first taking the Lexus for a spin on the salt (we managed 140 MPH). We headed west to Yosemite in California, and then motored up the Pacific Coast to Seattle and Vancouver. Once inside Canada we traveled east across the full continent to the Maritime Provences, and negotiated the entire coastlines of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland before returning to the United States.

The road trip took three months and covered 14,000 miles, and starting on the first day when I told Nancy about my idea of writing a novel around a crystal artifact, we talked about nothing but this new writing project on the entire trip. As one of us would drive the car, the other one was constantly taking notes. We actually wrote a Lexus IS300 into our manuscript, placing our fictional husband-and-wife heroes in this car as they followed the secrets of the crystal skull to Oak Island in Nova Scotia. Our road trip and the fictional road trip became mirrors of one another. By the time we got back home, we had finished a complete plot outline of our novel and had composed all the dialogue, word for word.

It took two months to put all of this into Microsoft Word, and another two years to find a literary agent and a publisher. When the finished novel, Stonecypher Road, was successfully published in late 2005, we took our first royalty check and applied it toward the purchase of a second Lexus, an RX 330silver to match the wonderful little car in which we wrote our novel.

Learn more about this author, Warren Longwell.
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