Looking Back on Five Novels

Why the hell do I keep doing this to myself?

Hi folks,

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything besides chapters of Departures, and in that time, quite a few of you new subscribers have quietly turned up. It reminds me of a regular coffeehouse gig I played in my early twenties, when strangers would just pop in, sit down, and look at me with an expression that said, “So, what’s this all about?”

I ask myself that question a lot, and over the years, the answer has changed. When I was young, it was about looking for attention, for validation, for fame. In midlife, it was about grasping for relevance. These days, it’s mostly about trying to inhabit a feeling—both in my life and in my writing. It’s about being present and open to the story as it unfolds.

This feels like a good time of year to reflect, so I thought it might be interesting to walk back through the five novels I’ve written as an exercise in connecting the dots, to see if a larger picture emerges. I evolved into a novelist. It wasn’t planned, but then again, I’ve never been much of a planner. I’ve stumbled into and through most of the roles I’ve played in my life. But when I write, I feel a sense of agency and confidence I don’t enjoy anywhere else.

I’m not sure why that is, but every book of fiction I’ve written has taught me something—about myself and about how I perceive the world around me. This post might be as close as I’ll ever get to a memoir. I hope you’ll enjoy looking back with me.

Rewind Playback (2012)

Write what you know.

On reflection, this is really the only kind of novel I could have written as my first attempt at the form. I didn’t set out to write an autobiographical book, but there’s a whole lot of me in this one. The curious thing about fiction is that it’s often emotionally more honest than memoir.

When I began the project, my kids were eleven and fifteen. I was nearly two decades into a marriage that was beginning to show the hairline cracks that would eventually break it apart. I found myself entrenched in a career and lifestyle I couldn’t remember choosing. I still wrote and recorded songs, released albums, and performed locally, but I had come to accept that I wouldn’t set the world on fire with my music as my younger self once believed. I needed to stop looking back over my shoulder at the road I hadn’t taken, and writing Rewind Playback allowed me to do that.

Writing the book was an indulgent feast, and I tore through the first draft in about five months, working on it during lunch breaks, on weekends, and sometimes in the wee hours of the morning. I can’t adequately express how much I enjoyed the freedom of the open page. Finally, I was free of the tyranny of lyrics with their rigid rules of rhyme, meter, and brevity. I could write sprawling landscapes and make intricate studies of a character’s inner world.

When I wrote this story of three childhood friends who grew up in a small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina and formed a band that would be both their greatest achievement and utter undoing, I was writing about three versions of myself.

This is a picture of the poster hanging in the marquee outside Eddie’s Attic to promote the book launch event in 2014.

Rewind Playback is a romantic book filled with big emotions and lots of “inside baseball” about the life of working musicians. It’s a story about longing, about the struggle to get what you always wanted, and about wanting what you’ve always had. It’s also a reckoning of the emotional debt we accumulate by midlife—after youthful dreams have been put to rest and we’re struggling to adapt to a life of fewer peaks and valleys.

I self-published it in 2014, and we threw a big launch party at Eddie’s Attic in Decatur, Georgia. I read from the stage where I had performed for many years alongside songwriter friends, some like John Mayer, who went on to have the kinds of careers I could only write about. You can buy a copy on Amazon if this one sounds appealing.

The Sound in the Space Between (2015)

Write what you feel.

I honestly thought writing a novel was a one-time thing for me—a greedy, illicit dalliance in midlife before returning to my “marriage” with music. I was wrong. Not long after I had completed the final draft of Rewind Playback, I started dreaming of another story. I had written everything I “knew” in the first book, so what was left?

I found myself drawn to writing about trauma with a capital T—the kind of trauma that’s the emotional equivalent of a car wreck, forever changing a person and the way they perceive the world. I began writing the story of two brothers who survived a complicated childhood with a sexually abusive father. I know some of the seeds for this story were sown by my enduring love for Wally Lamb’s epic book, I Know This Much Is True, but the heart of it came from seeing the damage that kind of abuse had done to people around me.

I wanted to show the tenderness between brothers and explore the vulnerability that blooms just below the surface of traditional masculinity in our society. I still grounded the story in a musical backdrop because I wasn’t ready to let go of that guardrail. The father is a musician and makes his sons musicians. They have a family band that plays on weekends.

It’s a dramatic and fairly heart-wrenching story but not without moments of levity and joy. I took every opportunity to use music as both jester and shaman, carrying the characters through the worst of it.

I never published the book. I queried some agents but found the subject a tough sell, and my belief in the story wasn’t matched by the tenacity to keep at it. I could have self-published, but I didn’t have the bandwidth to promote it, and I was keen to start writing another book.

One day, I may revisit publishing The Sound in the Space Between. My partner, Paradis, read the entire thing in one night when we first started dating, and I like to think it’s one of the reasons she fell in love with me. We’ve been together five years now, and she’s still the first person to read everything I write.

The Memory of My Shadow (2018)

Write what scares you.

I’ve previously written about this book here on Catch & Release and discussed it at length in an interview hosted by the fantastic writer and filmmaker

Kimberly Warner

, so if you want a deeper dive, you can check out those posts. With The Memory of My Shadow, I stepped into the frontier of writing about things I didn’t know. For whatever reason, I was drawn to write about subjects that scare me.

For over 25 years, I’ve had a day job working in software development. It’s how I’ve supported my family and paid for my kids’ college. I use computers to design and bring things to life that I’d never be able to achieve otherwise. In 2017, when I was working at a global consulting firm, I came into contact with the nascent capabilities of AI, and my head kind of exploded.

None of the great sci-fi works on AI had ever interested me much because they seemed too fantastical. But when I saw a colleague’s algorithm that could analyze the sentiment of customer reviews with a high degree of accuracy, I felt a creeping sensation that we were nearing a tipping point. This was still early days, and the technology was primitive at best, but the ingredients were all there. I couldn’t stop thinking about where the technology would lead. It was only a matter of time before AI would take over our lives in the same way mobile phones had. One day, we would likely all have an AI companion we depended on. This seemed inevitable.

The other engine behind this novel is my lifelong struggle to understand the nature of violence. I’ve always been a pacifist. I registered as a conscientious objector at twenty years old, back when we didn’t know the first Gulf War would only last for a CNN news cycle. I’ve always been against guns and what they represent. When the Columbine shooting happened, I was a brand-new father, and the event rocked me. But as the years passed and the body count rose with every new mass shooting—in post offices, schools, nightclubs, movie theaters, and grocery stores—I became desensitized. It was no longer an exceptional event.

When the Parkland school shooting happened in 2018, it was less than a blip on my workday radar. Later, I felt a deep sense of shame at my complacency. This failing stuck in my brain like a splinter.

When I set out to write this novel, I knew I wanted it to feel personal, which meant it had to be told from the first-person perspective. I chose a fierce woman as my protagonist—a survivor of the deadliest school shooting in American history—because I was honestly tired of men and all the suffering we’ve caused in the name of progress, control, and dominance. Writing in Magdalena’s voice was such a freeing experience.

Ah, The Smell of a New Book

To give you an idea of how consuming this novel was for me, I completed it during the most painful period of my personal life. If you’ve had to end a marriage after twenty-five years with someone, you’ll understand. Revising and tuning this story was where I went for refuge. When I had taken my drafts as far as I could, I hired a professional editor, which was eye-opening and instructive. I queried agents and was crestfallen to get so little interest for a book that could not have been more relevant for the times, so I set it aside, unsure if it would ever find an audience.

In 2022, when I started Catch & Release, I decided it would be fun to release the book as a serial. This decision to embrace a new way of publishing brought together all the things I love. Not only could I write fiction, but I could also score music for it and perform the narration. This last bit has been a joyful discovery. All the goofy accents and mimicry I’ve done since I was a kid watching Monty Python could be put to good use. I’m proud to say you can not only buy print and eBook copies of The Memory of My Shadow, but the audiobook is also available anywhere you listen to such things.

Harmony House (2020)

Write about being stuck.

Everyone went a little squirrelly during the pandemic. Everything shut down, and we were all required to pause our lives in whatever state they were and shelter in place. Is it any wonder I started a novel about six strangers trapped in a tiny house during a reality TV show competition?

It was less than a year after my marriage ended. My daughter (then son) was sent home from college, and we quarantined in an under-furnished apartment where we watched too much television and had hours of intense conversation. As difficult as that period was, I will always treasure the time with my daughter. We needed the space to unpack the trauma of our family blowing apart—and for her to share the beginning of her coming-out journey.

Like many people during quarantine, I needed an escape, so I became obsessed with the idea of buying some land in the mountains and building a colony of tiny homes. As I researched, I was amazed to discover so many brilliant designs, many engineered for sustainability. Something about the altruistic mission of these companies, operating within the less-than-altruistic game of capitalism, felt too rich not to use as a primary theme in a book.

The more I thought about America Incorporated, the more ironies surfaced that I wanted to explore—namely, the politically charged topic of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. The way morally bankrupt companies shamelessly cloaked themselves in virtue-signaling campaigns was too absurd not to dramatize. This angle gave me a natural way to build a diverse cast of characters artificially forced to coexist. What better microcosm is there than an eco-friendly tiny house? And what could be more American than a reality show competition where contestants vie to win that tiny house?

Introducing Harmony House

The confinement of the setting gave me plenty of opportunities for confrontations—big and small—as well as unlikely friendships and intimacies. In the beginning, my plan was for nothing big or dramatic to happen. I wanted to create a small world with human-sized stakes. But midway through, I realized this approach wasn’t sustainable. I became frustrated and bored with the project and eventually abandoned it, much to Paradis’s disappointment.

A couple of years later, after releasing The Memory of My Shadow as a serial here on Catch & Release, I cast about for what else I might publish, and my thoughts turned back to this abandoned story. I picked it up with renewed vigor, and what evolved was a bit of a thriller—a surprise even to me.

Insanely, I took up the high-wire act of releasing chapters of the book before I had even finished the roughest version of how it would end. But fortunately for me, something magical happened as I published new chapters. A community of brilliant readers and writers like

Mr. Troy Ford

and

Eleanor Anstruther

started following along and commenting. Their engagement was like jet fuel. Seeing their reactions and assumptions each week in the comments about how they imagined the story would play out inspired me to write in ways I never would have imagined.

Another thing I quickly realized was how much people were listening to my narration and the original music I scored for the series. By the finale, there was a sizable cohort of engaged readers, so I decided to perform the last chapter live over a Zoom call. It was nerve-wracking but also incredibly fun—an excuse to be face-to-face with so many folks I had come to admire as writers on Substack, many of whom had become friends.

Departures (2024)

Write about the end.

That brings us to the present and, if you’re a new subscriber, the story in flight—Departures—that I release new chapters for every Tuesday. Any writer will tell you that stakes are what make a good story, and the star of the show when it comes to stakes is death. It is, after all, the end of all our stories. It’s as common as rain, and yet there’s no greater mystery. It can’t be foreseen.

But what if it could? What if we could know the exact, immutable date that everyone around us would die? Would it change how we walk through the world? This was the simple question I asked myself when I first tried to write Departures back in 2017. I did my best, but ultimately abandoned it after four chapters because it seemed fanciful, and I wanted it to feel grounded and believable. I revisited it again a couple of years later, only to shelve it once more.

It wasn’t until my father had his second brush with death earlier in 2024 that the door to the story began to open. Later in the year, I learned that a dear childhood friend of mine had been diagnosed with ALS—an illness that is ultimately a death sentence. These events, coupled with the looming death of our beloved family dog of sixteen years, inspired me to write about the specter of death in a post back in March. That reflection ultimately led me to pick up the story of Departures again.

Death and Other Possibilities

Rather than take up where I had left off, I decided to scrap everything and start from scratch with completely new characters. The words flowed with an intensity I’d never felt before in my writing. Death was no longer something far away or academic—it was hovering very close to me. This was also around the time I struck up a friendship with the amazing

Chloe Hope

, after being enchanted by her ongoing conversation with death in her Substack,

Death & Birds

.

As of this writing, we’re in the final third of the book, and I have yet to write the closing chapters. I hope to carve out time for this over the holiday break. I know how the story will end, but I’m always surprised by how it changes once I actually begin writing.

A Walk Among the Living

What’s Next?

Honestly, I have no idea what’s on the horizon after Departures is wrapped but if you’ve learned anything about me from this epic post, it’s that I fly by the seat of my pants. The only thing I know for certain is that I will continue writing novels.

I’m so grateful to this community of writers I’ve found here on Substack and even more grateful to you, dear reader for giving me the precious give of your time. I’d love to know how this retrospective felt to you and I’d be happy to answer any questions you might have in the comments. Thank you for reading and happy holidays!