In search of...
About six years ago, I stepped off the edge of the world. I closed all my social media accounts. I shut down my blog. For a while, I didn’t even have a website. I also fired my agent, stopped submitting to major publishers, and considered myself retired. But for some people, retirement never lasts. That’s how it was for me.
I never stopped writing, and for a short while, I made these books I wrote for myself available for sale. No more. I pulled those, too, and they will never return. I’m done with crime and thrillers unless I approach them on my own terms, not commercial ones. That’s over.
Over the past year, I’ve taken a new approach to my work, addressing what I felt were shortcomings in my storytelling technique. The result has been two of the best books I’ve ever written: The Breaking of the Vessels and Little Aliens. The first is about the dissolution of a marriage after infidelity, and the second is about a young woman living in a community of forty-eight people in the Nevada desert.
In commercial terms, you’d call these upmarket, and as I submit to agents, looking for someone to shop Vessels and Little Aliens, I’ve begun work on a third manuscript, Ten Count, about a boxer in Chicago during the Great Depression. A novel in the tradition of FX Toole’s Pound for Pound.
This is a new phase in my life and work. I hope you’ll join me.