Strange dystopian thoughts creep into my conscious as I walk down the city street. People stay a little back from each other—hands in pockets. No one hits the button to cross the intersection at the circle. The church looms ahead. The structure, all brick with heaven reaching spires, crosses time from 1874 until the urban now. The city seems quieter as I approach. I don’t know why I am here. When my mother was alive, she had wanted me to get baptized. The Episcopal church she

Tenacity is the key to the submission process. The publishing world is fairly small and is slowly being eaten away by changes in commerce and technology. Even with the advent of e-books, real books prevail to some extent. Traction is hard to come by in self-publishing. One of the problems I have faced is my books in print were previous published making them reprints more or less. Throughout the years, I have continued to push forward with submissions in hopes of a breakthroug

The disarray of moving across the country this month has thrown some chaos into my writing routines. Getting used to a new city, unpacking the boxes we brought, and the sights of the capital, have been surreal. There has not been enough time until the day before the thirteenth—my self-imposed deadline—to write a blog. I have decided the best course is to link to another spot on my website where the first few chapters of Wild Boys - A Peculiar Western Novel are free by subscri

When I first decided to keep my writing, it was all done by hand. I would buy college ruled spiral notebooks and color code them for projects. The freedom of writing outside, in nature, was a big draw. I took notebooks with me wherever I went and would write when inspiration struck. I even had small pocket-size notepads to keep to whip out when seeing a random character walking the streets or a strange situation. I would jot down notes and give a fictional story to the charac

In 2017, I took over all my past projects. The first I released was Anarchy - Strange Tales of Outsiders, on Friday the 13th, in January of that year. The book spans the earliest beginnings of my work, Where the Road Roams (2009), to the more recent, The Carny Cage (2017), and marked the start of my website and other DS releases that followed. Anarchy is fitting turn on my writing journey. It took me a long time to figure out my genre. My books were hard to peg with horror, w

I came up with the idea for The Carny Cage while I was on the road working a gig at the St Paul Rodeo in Oregon. On break, I had lunch at the carnival. People watching is always a good way to understand characters. Most carnies seem a little rough and a prison story made sense to me. I liked the idea of the spinning cage and the chaos inside Dirk’s head. When I was a teenager, I entertained the idea of running off with the carnival. I went so far as to talk to a owner of one

The influence of True Crime has touched my work. The ideas can be loosely based as in Escape from Dolphin Street or more overtly as in Lane Bowden 1973. A story takes on a sense of fear, a deeper horror that resonates, when put in the context of fiction that is based on a real life event. The genesis of Dolphin Street was a combination of true crimes. One crime in Billings, Montana (see The Curse of Dolphin Street blog) involved a vicious gang of street punks, a murder, and a

I had lost my way for a while, not realizing it as it was happening. I think the only life I allowed myself was through writing. I am not saying I did not live just not to the fullest while I hunkered down and wrote Rebel’s Edge. All three manuscripts were completed as I travelled for work. The chaos of modern life was forgotten as I remembered a punk life once lived and a teenage self lost to time. The relief and emptiness of finishing the three books and the curse of not be

Writing is a journey that never ends. I know that some of you are curious as to my next projects. My, based on true events, teenage trilogy, Rebel’s Edge, is complete and I have been in the process of submitting to open publishers and agents. So far I have nine unresolved status’ of seventeen entries. The eight rejections have ranged from the standard form letters and personal encouragement to the humorous of having no interest in the punk generation. I will keep them in flow

In 1998, I was visiting San Francisco and exploring the Castro District. It was gentrifying some at that time, but the neighborhood still held its gay charm. I have always been drawn to the dark side of things and in the shadows of the enclave of the BART train station I found an angry piece of graffiti. Spray-painted on the wall in blood red was the inscription, “Burn the AZT Death Tarp!” Twenty-one years ago the epidemic was just being slowed with the advance of new drugs,