My next novel, Sound Effect Infinity, will release early this spring. I’ve been busy prepping it for print publishing by Flat Branch Press over the past few weeks. A special edition hardcover will have a soft launch in February. If you’re interested in ordering a copy, drop me a line, sign up to the right for our mailing list, or follow me on Instagram or Facebook.
In the mean time, I’m dropping a brief scene below, and not from the early sections of
Continue reading
[Note from 2026: A lot happened to prevent the proper publication of Sound Effect Infinity until February 2026, where this note is coming from. Click the links where you see them, and you’ll find the book posted to Amazon as a special edition hardcover offering. If you read below, you’ll see where things were, but not where they are now]
I already feel like a jerk. The only thing that is going to keep me from being selfish and single-minded here in 2024 is if I need surgery or get diagnosed with cancer or just don’t wake up some morning. A solid, working draft of my third novel for The Story Plant is due in December of 2024. The title we’re operating with right now is Notes on the Golden Country. I spent much of 2023 doing research and making notes for this year’s efforts. By late August I had started up on a first draft. As 2024 gets uncaged, I am about 120 pages in to Part I of three parts. I’m going to be a selfish jerk the rest of this year until I’m done. Meaning, I don’t want to come over to your house, go on a long walk, or anything else that will muddle my focus on writing this very odd story.
Continue reading
A version of this essay was published in the Illumination publication on Medium several weeks ago.
These days, I wish as hard as I can for good things that are considered impossible to happen, like there actually being a Santa Claus with a whole team of people way up North who spend all year working on ways to gift the world with love and happiness and really cool new technology to boot. I also wonder sometimes whether we’ll be alive when the next truly artistic and creative musically gifted songwriters come along the way the Beatles did and don’t just change the course of music, but change the power of creativity and aesthetics for artists everywhere. I think and wish for that kind of stuff, because I firmly believe that envisioning amazing things is the only way we get beyond the malaise we’ve built for ourselves here in the 2020s.
I also wish people read and talked about utopian concepts more, and at least believed in the real possibility of more ideal societies. Whether we like it or not, the job of life will always be to build a better future for all of humankind. Note that italicized word there. It’s important.
Continue reading
I’ve spent my entire life astounded by the magic of music, appreciating everything from opera and Gregorian chant to bluegrass and every kind of jazz there is. But what exactly is being touched in us and inspired when we listen to our favorite songs? What is this creation of new and complex emotion, the stimulation of sensuality, bittersweet memory, at times even, that awareness of sublime connection to the universe? How full and rich our lives are because of the beauty and profundity of sound waves organized into melody, rhythm, timber, and harmonic tones! Friedrich Nietzsche said it best: “Without music, life would be a mistake.”
Continue reading
I am grateful as heck to all the people who have been enjoying Old Music for New People, and to the team at The Story Plant working hard to get folks to pay attention to this story that wants to touch your heart. Sometimes I get quick texts or messages on Facebook where people tell me how engrossed they are in the story or that they’re having fun with 100 pages to go.
Gender identity is the big story driver in this novel, but there’s so much more to identity than the simple binary opposites of boy or girl. I don’t want to give the story away, but when one person questions who they are, whole families (extended families, in fact) become part of the questioning process. They become part of the answer, too. Things get messy. They can be intense. But the only way people grow is through messy, intense questions and answers.
Continue reading
My coming-of-age novel, Old Music for New People, will be published by the independent publishing house The Story Plant on December 7th. Go here or click on the cover widget (near the top right on the screen if you are using a big screen; probably down low on the scroll if you are using a small screen) to go to the book’s landing page. You’ll find all the links you could ever need to pre-order the paperback and digital versions now. Reviewers with NetGalley accounts can now also access the ARC (Advance Reviewer Copy) at the NetGalley site. This is my first official novel, so I can use any and all the reviews I can get.
So what’s the book about? Well, there’s a big conversation going on in this country right now about gender identity. Mainstream media tends to focus on silly issues like the bathrooms people are allowed to use and whether transgender girls should be permitted to play sports with other girls.
Continue reading
I’ve spent the spring adapting stories I began writing almost a decade ago into a novel. The stories all had to do somehow with a character I called Julia Davenport. It’s been quite an interesting task converting short stories into long prose. Six tales were completed by 2005, and another four or five fitful starts came after that. I figured I could finish these starts over the spring and then turn it all into a book that would effectively amount to a series of vignettes about life here in the early part of this new century.
Julia was the connecting piece through all of the stories I wrote. However, each piece was composed in a different voice with a somewhat unique narrator and a weird perspective on life and love. In many ways, although I wasn’t overtly aware of it at the time, this approach to creating fiction is now a common methodology for contemporary storytellers.
Point of view is a key element in all storytelling. The standard way of doing things is Continue reading
I spent far too much time in 2012 sitting in a little room by myself trying to get people to pay attention to my books and far too little time writing and editing. I had a lot to learn about being an independent writer and publisher. That time was necessary, but it still makes me feel so far behind the eight-ball. It’s a lonely thing, sitting in a little room trying to get people to pay attention to your work.
As last year began, I knew I wanted to publish two sets of stories and my first novel, Beyond the Will of God. I accomplished those goals. The story sets, Trying to Care and Implosions of America, lay out the beginnings of what my true Continue reading