Writer
This is a happy day for me because Carterville is officially a series! Today the first Carterville novel, Out of a Christmas Sky is out. This is a Christmas murder mystery with plenty of suspects and lots of twists and surprises. It’s also a quarantine novel, drafted May – July, 2020 fairly early during the COVID pandemic. I mention this for a couple of reasons: As I wrote about previously, I’m very curious what kind …
I don’t know if you noticed, but this last week or so the sweet holiday movies started hitting our lists of things to stream. And while late October may seem a little early, that doesn’t feel as true in 2020 as it has some other years. I don’t know about you, but I could use a break from the pandemic, and the election here in the US, and the storms and fires, and the endless …
Sometimes a title makes all the difference. It’s like this sprinkle of magic that makes a project come together and suddenly it all makes sense. And that is true for Unfinished Business: The Cases of Walter Anchor Ghost Detective. Unfinished Business encapsulates the journey of an earth bound spirt (i.e. ghost) perfectly. And especially Walter Anchor as he tries to solve his own murder. As I was finishing up Walter’s stories earlier in the year, …
It’s release day! The Red Arrow Murders is out! It’s been a long journey with Walter Anchor. The idea for a ghost detective came to me when I was working on To Be a Fool, which came out in 2013. I started his first story while that novel was finishing up. I was having so much fun with it that he and Emily have a cameo in To Be a Fool. The initial thought was …
With the series I write, I always think of them in terms of the wider story arc, and in the case of Neutrinoman and Lightningirl in terms of Seasons. I call them “Seasons” for a reason. There is a larger story being told across all the episodes. And, yes, “Season” and “Episode” sounds like a TV show on purpose. It’s the way I think of this. These three books (Off Book, Hard Times, and Elemental …
Okay, Walter Anchor used to be an actor so why not have him solving a murder in a Hollywood? A murder with a particularly Hollywood kind of vibe. He’s a ghost after all and moving about is easy. That is the starting point to this unique murder mystery. Long ago when I was in high school and then again briefly about ten years ago, I did some acting. As a teenager it was plays, lots …
Today I am wrapping up Season 2 of Neutrinoman and Lightningirl: A Love Story with Elemental Factors. This season delighted me because in the writing it took so many interesting turns that I didn’t expect (yeah, I know it sounds strange, but it’s the way I write. I follow the characters and they sure surprised me here). I don’t have a timeline yet, but there will be a Season 3. There is a lot more …
There’s are best practices for writing a series and then there are… what I did with this series. It has been an education on what not to do. My wife once jokingly called this story (in a different form with a different name) my “white whale.” She cast me as Captain Ahab on a quest to exact my revenge on Moby Dick. It wasn’t quite that bad, but it was a struggle. An unusually difficult …
Back in 2017 when I was doing my Short Story Marathon, stars kept coming up thematically. Or, more specifically, that feeling I get when I look up at the Milk Way on a cold clear night. Over and over stars appeared in those stories. There was this feeling I wanted to convey, this thought, this concept. And while a lot of the stories benefited from the idea, I knew it wasn’t quite there. Until I …
Hey, it’s release day! Hard Times: Neutrinoman and Lightningirl: A Love Story, Episode 5 is out. I’ll have the blurb below, and yes, it’s on sale, but as this release has been approaching I’ve realized something strange. Even though I wrote this book several years ago (I’m really behind with this series) and planned its release last December, it’s a book for this moment. For those not familiar with this series, it’s a boy-meets-girl kind …