A few years back, my wife encouraged me to enter a short story contest. I was grinding away as a tree climber and a bike shop employee in Hood River, Oregon, staring down some difficult choices; become a business owner in a trade I was good at but loathed on many levels, or continue cruising along in the mediocrity of someone else’s business. I was beaten and bruised from wrestling
Two Hours Before Winter is virtually free for a month, beginning tomorrow, August 13th, 2021. Choking on wildfire smoke yet again? Quarantining for the umpteenth time from the latest variant and climbing the walls? Well, friend…sit back, cough up a measly buck and let this highly lauded dark fiction novel take you from your present reality on a trip through the early 1970’s northern British Columbia, where indigenous folklore collides
You knew what was going to happen, but you did it anyway… The problem with family is that some of the best stories you own cannot (or perhaps should not) be told until the subject(s) whom the stories concern die, and who knows how you’ll feel about it then? You could spend a goodly portion of your life waiting for this to happen, which is in itself a highly
Kirkus, the gold standard of reviews, has returned their thoughts on Two Hours Before Winter. Really, it’s more a synopsis than a review, even giving up a few of the surprise elements of the story, which seems a trifle ham-handed. At least those reading the review will have an idea what they are getting into before the narrative shifts down a gear and punches it. Thanks to those who’ve left
A quote from The Great Western, a madam in Yuma’s territorial prison days. We’re back here for an uncertain amount of time to play pickleball for blood and also to finish the treatment on my next novel, which is in the same vein as Two Hours Before Winter but takes place during the Civil War and involves, among other historical figures, Ulysses S. Grant. Happy to be back and see
The task of rescuing the self published book from the death spiral around the drain into which it is born is daunting and thankless. Much like writing it. Well, that’s not all true. The writing can be enjoyable. It was for me, anyway, those moments where you chuckle at your own ingenuity and failures. It takes a masochistic sonofabitch to sit down at a writing instrument every day with loathing
The Pacific Northwest Gothic Crime Novel, Two Hours Before Winter, is now available free for five days, from Friday, September 18th through Tuesday, September 22nd. Please feel free to download it and share it with your literary friends. The reviews are stellar and the story, though set in the early 1970s, is timely. Also, I encourage you to leave a review. Us authors live and die by your feedback through
Where do story ideas come from? Everywhere. Here’s where the seed of Two Hours Before Winter came from. Long before I’d started writing it, my wife told me about a tragic event, events really, that happened when she was a young girl growing up in a small fishing and logging village along British Columbia’s inside passage. I’ll not go into it for reasons of spoiling the story, or for
A killer is stalking victims in the early 1970’s Pacific Northwest. Sergeant Nick Harden is brought in to solve the crimes, but when his own daughter becomes one of the victims and his wife leaves him, the life he knew is torn away. Several years later, hollowed and alone, he picks up a young girl walking the highway. She knows things about him that she shouldn’t, triggering memories of a past he can’t quite recall. Harden begins to believe the murders and
Two Hours Before Winter, a 117,000 word Dark Lit, Pacific Northwest Gothic novel will be available by August 31st on Amazon. Thanks to all for your patience and support. It’s been a huge learning process getting this project finished, and it hasn’t really settled in yet. Only a slight vacancy felt in not having had to edit for two days straight. I really hope you enjoy it, and please