Bill Missett

Soul Surfer Johnny Returns: More Wild Adventures... As the Puerto Grinds Bill Missett

While writing Soul Surfer Johnny, the first book in this series, I was flooded with so many additional memories of ''Puerto Tranquilo'' that I knew a second book was waiting to be written. By the time the first book was finished, I had jotted down more than 125 other memorable episodes. I was challenged to write the book that became Soul Surfer Johnny by Joel Fotinos, vice president for spiritual books for Penguin-Putnam publishers, during a lunch we had in 2007. He had just read my Awakening The Soul: The Trilogy, and challenged me to write a novel incorporating the essence of that tome, ala the most successful novel of the millennium, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. While Soul Surfer Johnny is certainly no Da Vinci Code, it does carry forth that essence of spiritual growth, describing a young man's soul awakening. The heart of the story, however, remains his many wild surfing adventures, most in Puerto. But it wasn't planned that way. A number of years ago, I began compiling a list of topics for my Puerto book, which I knew I would write some day. But I had no plans of incorporating those memories into the book Fotinos challenged me to write, revealing how to create the spiritual awakening possible within each of us. However, when I started writing, it was immediately apparent where this story was going . . . to Puerto, where my personal spiritual awakening occurred some 25 years earlier. Thus, the first Soul Surfer Johnny book had a serious underlying story of spiritual awakening that seemed out of place in a surfing adventure novel. But it really wasn't, because what was being portrayed as happening to Johnny really had happened to me, and has occurred to others, so I knew it was eminently possible. I had so much fun writing Soul Surfer Johnny that I immediately started writing this book, its direct sequel, but with a difference. This volume does not have that heavy underlying story of spiritual growth