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My daughter is ten now, but when she was five she was an avid soccer player. Better put, I was an avid soccer dad. She'd throw on her bright red uniform, and I'd speed her to each game, talking strategy all the way. Once in the parking lot, she'd jump out, skip onto the field, and find some other girl to hold hands with while they'd bounce around for a half hour. Oblivious to everything except how wonderful life was. Roughly every other game, if the ball came rolling right to her, she'd kick that bugger. Then I'd strut around, point her out to all the other dads with inferior children.

It had been a while since one of those strutting moments, and I was second guessing that soccer scholarship when it happened—the rarest event in kiddie soccer—the breakaway. Somehow, my girl ended up with the ball, the herd was on the far side of the field, and my precious was about to score. She actually dribbled right down to the goal. I was moments away from immortality. She couldn't miss if she tried. The goalie was sitting down, picking grass. All she had to do was kick it.

But she stopped, turned, and scanned the sideline. Her gaze found me and her face lit and she jumped and waved.

"Look at me, Daddy! Look at me!"

"I am!" I started to make kicking motions, and she must've figured them out because she took three steps back (like all kids before they kick big), and was completely engulfed by fifteen screaming children. The next thing I saw was that ball flying the other way, the herd in pursuit. But not my girl. She just stood in front of the goal, that huge smile still plastered on her face.

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I suppose all readers have come across these from time to time-books that stick, books that jab internal sore spots we don't know we have. I'm guessing that's why we tear up without reason, flare up when we haven't been wronged. We're just taking our own sweet time, turning the pages, sipping our tea, and wham. We're blind-sided by some truth that picks the scab off an emotion that never really healed.

It's kind of like waking up after a hard day's work. We discover, in painful ways, muscles we didn't know we had. Same deal.

I certainly bump into these books-books that hurt. But I never imagined I'd write one. Writing was always my escape from pain, not my portal into it. Jerk, California, the story of a young man who struggles with both his Tourette Syndrome and the losses in his life, changed that.

My experience with Tourette's was a painful one, my journey to self-acceptance full of potholes and detours. I guess that's why my debut novel takes the form of a road-trip. It had to. For me, there was no other way to write it-no other way to express the feelings I had. This book hurt to write.

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Jonathan Friesen is our guest blogger during the week of November 3rd. If you have any questions for Jonathan Friesen, add a comment to any of his posts. Here is some more information about Jerk, California:

Twitch, Jerk, Freak—Sam Carrier has been called them all. Because of his Tourette’s syndrome, Sam is in near constant motion with tics and twitches and verbal outbursts. So, of course, high school is nothing but torment. Forget friends; forget even hoping that beautiful, perfect Naomi will look his way. And home isn’t much better with his domineering stepfather reminding him that the only person who was more useless than Sam was his dead father, Jack. But then an unexpected turn of events unearths the truth about his father. And suddenly Sam doesn’t know who he is, or even where he’ll go next. What he does know is that the only girl in the world who can make him happy and nervous at the same time is everywhere he turns . . . and he’d give anything just to be still.