Brenda Bott didn't always plan on writing a “real book,” she said. Originally, the Arvada author hoped to write a book just for friends and family that would detail her and her husband Glenn's story after he was nearly killed in a cycling crash.

However, after Bott's editor convinced her to broaden the book's reach, Bott's first book, The Cocoon Chronicles, hit the shelves this summer with a launch party on Aug. 23 and is now being sold by Barnes & Noble, Target and Amazon.

The book draws from Bott's writings directly after her husband's bike crash with an SUV, which occurred in June 2004 and left him with a serious brain injury.

Brenda Bott was told he would likely not survive. However, she was confident he'd pull through from the first time she saw him after the accident, she said.

“I held his hand and said, `if you want to stay, I know you can do it,'” she said. “He squeezed me hand and from that point I knew: `he's going to be OK.'”

Weeks after the crash, Glenn Bott had regained consciousness and months later, he was participating in an outpatient program.

Sharing in his wife's optimism, when doctors told him his progress had plateaued that fall, he didn't listen.

“I told her, `I'm not doing that. I'm going to fully recover,'” said Glenn Bott — who, today, has recovered, works as a professional speaker and has returned to bicycling.

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Throughout Glenn Bott's 2004 recovery, his wife detailed his progress in a journal and kept those close to the couple updated through daily emails.

“All of my friends kept telling me, `you have to write a book,'” she said — and more than a decade later, she took their advice, drawing from her journal entries and emails to tell the story and inspire others in similarly challenging situations, she said.

From the point when she committed to writing the book, the entire process took more than two years, she said.

“Glenn helped me proofread a lot. We've proofread that thing like 200 times,” Brenda Bott said, saying that each time, her editor sent her a whole host of suggestions to tell “the same story in a different way and different order.”

“It's a process and it takes longer than you think,” she laughed. But the commitment was worth it, she said, and “every time we proofread it, we'd say, `it's a good book.'”

As for the book's main message, the story has the same theme as each of Glenn Bott's speeches: a positive spirit can change anything, the couple said, adding that they learned this lesson from a former mentor.

“The takeaway has been that what you focus on expands,” he said.

Brenda Bott agreed.

“Glenn wasn't supposed to live through this, but he's got such a powerful mind and spirit,” she said. “The message of the book is: don't listen to prognoses or statistics. It's an inspirational love story.”