"I didn't set out to write The MoonQuest," Mark David Gerson explains of his novel's genesis. "The MoonQuest found me."

More precisely, an odd-looking man in an even odder-looking coach pulled by two odd-colored horses found him.

It was March 1994 and Mark David was teaching a creative writing workshop in Toronto. As participants settled into writing, these characters — who would later become the mysterious O'ric and his mystical mares, Rykka and Ta'ar — rode onto Mark David's blank page.

Their tale would become the opening scene of the first draft of a novel that would reveal neither its story nor title to him for many months.

When it finally did, Mark David was living in rural Nova Scotia on Canada's Atlantic seabord, where The MoonQuest's initial drafts took form.

It took more than a dozen years of revisions, each penned in a different part of Canada or the United States, before The MoonQuest won its first award (third-place, 2006 New Mexico Discovery Awards for unpublished fiction) and found its home with LightLines Media. It has since won five awards, including a New Mexico Book Award and a Gold Medal in the Independent Publishers Book Awards.

Throughout that time, Mark David has continued to guide groups and individuals through the same blocks to creative power, personal empowerment and spiritual growth experienced by Toshar and his fellow Q'ntanans in The MoonQuest.

In his early days of teaching, when Mark David focused solely on writing, he worked with poets and playwrights, novelists and educators, amateurs and professionals, people who didn't believe they could write and people with a compelling call to write. All benefited from his groundbreaking techniques and exercises. He has distilled his philosophies and experiences into a book of writing inspiration, practice and instruction, The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write, and companion 2-CD set of guided meditations.

Today, though still offering writing workshops and one-on-one coaching sessions, Mark David is an internationally recognized spiritual teacher and inspirational speaker, mentor and writer whose words reach readers in more than two dozen countries.

When not on the road with his workshops and seminars, Mark David makes his home in New Mexico. He is currently working on a sequel to The MoonQuest and his screenplay adaptation of the book is in active development with Anvil Springs Entertainment.