The Blog

I’m so damn proud of this novel. Until now, I’ve been writing this blog in roughly chronological order, but I’m skipping over my seventh novel, Omegaball, to discuss my most recent release, Strong Bon...

While running California Coldblood Books, I’ve received a few hundred submissions. I’ve appeared on podcasts and on some convention panels in my capacity as editor, and I’ve also been interviewed a fe...

Let’s talk about query letters. This is only my opinion and my advice, but if I were you, I would never pay a cent for a query letter critique. I would never attend, much less pay for, a workshop abou...

Okay. Let’s have some fun. My fifth novel, The Odds, is one of two titles I’ve had traditionally published. There’s a somewhat long story behind how it landed at a publishing house. I’ll share some of...

I think this is the best novel I’ve ever written. Such as it is. I can’t point to some massive, accomplished body of work. I can’t point to much success—though it’s not nothing—and I doubt the Island...

I used to think of The Island Circus as one novel.  I still do, for the most part, but after I finally finished this novel—the overall process was more than six years—it felt like two novels, one a ve...

One of my primary progressions as a novel-writer—I blanch at calling myself a novelist, because it’s never been my full-time job—has been to go from writing novels on the fly to outlining them, or as...

At the behest of no one, I thought I’d describe the creative process behind every novel I’ve written. By my count, I’ve written nine (or eight, depending). Sometimes that number feels like a great acc...

We all know that the second season of Twin Peaks sucks, right? Not so, and that’s not because the final twenty-two episodes of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s seminal early-90s TV series are without faul...