Things I’ve been working on . . .
Title: The Poisoned Moon
status: complete
word count: 83,000
summary:
At the center of The Poisoned Moon is the late Selene Sweet and the hundreds of artifacts she left behind. The art, sketchbooks, journals, hand-made jewelry, and ideas that inspired her appear in vignettes (and the epigraphs) throughout the story and seem to reflect on and influence the lives of those she touched. Her devout husband, Truman, still struggles with her death and the monk-like isolation it has left him with until his world is up-ended by Zoe, a young artist and part-time dancer, who seems to be a near perfect doppelganger for Selene. Afraid to talk about her to his friends at church, Truman reaches out to Justin, a man whose presence in Selene’s past has troubled him for years. They form a reluctant friendship as each one wrestles with the meaning of Zoe’s eerie resemblance to Selene, and all the old memories and regrets that resurface. While Truman pursues Zoe, convinced he must rescue her, and Justin tries to keep her at a distance even as she insinuates herself into his life, a third man, Zoe’s stalker, orbits them all like a comet, occasionally making his presence known until he crashes violently into their midst, putting Zoe’s life at risk and threatening the final, most important artifact Selene left behind.
Title: Far Nineteen
Status: Complete
Word Count: 122,500
Summary:
Unearth one secret, and others will follow.
There are secrets buried all over the city of Nedohana, stretching all the way back to the 1936 Booker Heights race war, and it seems they all have something to do with two families; the Haydens and the Wilcos. John Wilco and Emmett Hayden were close friends in high school, despite John being white and Emmett, black, but they haven’t seen each other since that night in 1960 when their fathers buried a time capsule in a Chrysler Imperial and Emmett’s twin brother, Walter, boarded a bus for Mexico, never to be seen again. When John returns to Nedohana in 2010 to see the time capsule unearthed, he expects his visit to be uneventful, but when Walter’s remains are found in the buried car, and John is accused of the murder, John and Emmett must confront each other and the complicated, racially charged past that once made them fast friends but has also kept them estranged for half a century
Title: The Palace of Winds
status: complete
word count: 126,000
summary:
While visiting his son’s family, eighty-one year old Carl “Bud” Malott falls ill. Reluctant to tell his son about his fever, he is overtaken by hallucinations and dreams that propel him back to his life during the 1930s. Echoing, at first, the story of Jason and The Golden Fleece, Bud sets out on a journey from Kansas to California, hoping to find work to support his widowed mother and younger sister. Along the way he encounters Klansmen on the hunt, violent Texas cowboys, the twin daughters of an incestuous preacher, and a legendary gunfighter pursued by three women. In LA, Bud falls in love with Madeline whose father and brother are connected to the mob. When Bud is set up to take the fall for an embezzlement scheme, Madeline kills her brother to secure their escape. While hiding out on a sheep ranch in Montana, their guilt and Madeline’s father catch up with them. Alone, Bud catches out on a freight train and wanders the country for years until a simple act of compassion (and his present day illness) puts him on the path home.
The first of a planned trilogy The Palace of Winds deals with the loss of father figures, the meaning of manhood, and how modernity can isolate us from a stable sense of purpose and direction.