The Story Behind BLACK RIVER

 So, this was me back when I first started writing Black River. 

And here is the story behind the making of the story.

I don't share this lightly because I'm sure my criticism of the military industrial complex will offend some people.

The New Goodreads Rival

Meet Book DNA, formerly Shepherd.com, a new place to share your favorite books, meet other readers and authors, and feature your own if you are an author. Book DNA matches readers with books based on individual tastes. If you are frustrated with Goodreads (I personally abhor the recent increase in popup ads), check out Book DNA.

Right now readers can submit their favorite five of 2025. Here's mine.  My list features the best with rural noir tension and environmental conflict, themes my new novel, Black River, shares.

It's fun to share your favorites and easy to find new ones. All ad free!!

My Character Love Affair

I have an essay in Wild Ink Publishing about putting a character up a tree, falling in love with them, and getting them down.

Check it out! 

And pre-orders for BLACK RIVER open today. My main character isn't literally up a tree, only in hot water.

Or should I say cold?

Published by Unsolicited Press, the gutsy, small indie publisher from Portland, Oregon.  Available now for pre-order from Asterism Books, a boutique distributor with deep indie-bookstore relationships. Thanks for supporting me, Indie publishing, and independent bookstores everywhere!

p.s. Book Friends, I made a playlist!  My first attempt and it was fun matching songs to the mood and progression of of the story.  

THE BURNT HAND

In response to the prompt from Poets & Storytellers to write a personal message to the rest of humanity, the thing you'd most like to communicate, this collaborative poem does as good a job as any I could relay on my own.

THE BURNT HAND

smoke shrouded Quebec
singing sparrow doesn't sense         (yvonne)
her demise is near

burgers hissing on iron

dad wipes  his watering eyes            (david)

sleeves rolled elbows bowed

she reclaims her patch of green        (yvonne)

from desert's burnt hand

cracks in the sidewalks

dandelions pushing through              (david)

before getting sprayed

cut logs piled precision high

stumps remember touching sky       (yvonne)

Amazon clearing

gaps widen in canopy                          (david)

wingbeats fade away

The rengay is a form of linked verse consisting of six thematic verses collaborated by two or three poets with alternating 3 and 2-sentence stanzas. For The Burnt Hand I collaborated with David Bogomolny at The Skeptic's Kaddish.  It was his suggestion and encouragement that birthed this poem. See more, explanation and history behind the form Here!

Sunshine in the Cemetery

                                                                      Dark Matter is like the space                                                                                       between people                                                                                        -Tracy Smith "Life on Mars" 

This month is named for Mars, that bloodthristy Roman God of War and eponymous red planet, and this post is a tribute to Tracy Smith's "Life on Mars" the Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry in 2012.  Frank Tassone at dVerse, the Poet's Pub, has suggested we write a haibun in the spirit of Smith's extended elergy for her late father. 

She who taught me to set a table, make my bed, and say my prayers waits for spring with no complaint— the boys of summer—but another sore appeared on her ankle and she wonders aloud What will become of me? I’m still a child while she is here, when she is gone what will become of me?

Whirl of black wing through the trees. Watchful crows remember face. Red tulips match her dress and his bow tie. Easter finery, cemetery grass, soft and matted underfoot. Why not believe as Camus did that two can become reunited as one?

Vase of daffodils

Last a week when brought inside

Sunshine in a jar

The haibun form consists of one or two paragraphs of prose that evoke an experience followed by a haiku, nature based, that complements the prose.

Thanks Frank for the evocative prompt.

Music and Dementia

 

                                                    We don’t stop playing because we grow old;                                                                 we grow old because we stop playing.                                                                      -  George Bernard Shaw

Does the music you enjoy indicate intellectual capacity?

Stereotypically, classical music is the favorite genre of the pretentious and intellectually elite. While this isn’t always true, research suggests that there might be a bit of truth to that stereotype. 

Two independent studies, conducted in Britain and Italy respectively, found that those who have greater intellectual function tend to correlate with liking classical music. In the British study, doctors found that musical tastes changed as patients lost brainpower to dementia, with some who had previously loved classical music turning away from it in favor of pop. The Italian study produced almost identical results, with complete turnarounds in musical tastes as gray matter in the brain was damaged or diminished.

This isn’t to say that all pop fans are mentally incompetent or lack smarts, researchers from both studies were quick to assert, only that it appears to take more brain power to be able to appreciate classical music. 

I find this interesting but still love listening to everything from Green Day to Artie Shaw and the 3 B's, and Eddie Vedder to Mel Carter. 
 

They're Taking Over The World

AI has moved from mildly irritating to intrusively pushy in a matter of months. In writing platforms they are especially obnoxious. AI has its place, don't get me wrong, but not in creative writing, and it should be something one opts into not something that is foisted upon us without our consent or knowledge. 

And.....it's not as smart as it thinks it is.  For instance the Gmail Gemini bot doesn’t know the difference between periodically and sporadically. He refused to believe the latter is a word.  Some of the creep's edits (so called "corrections") are just plain funny. So we might as well laugh. For instance, when proofreading copy, I recently came across this AI invention: He was fuzzy on details became  he was a fuzzy tail. 

I’m managed to turn off some of the AI “enhancements” but not all of them. And with every update, Google throws a new wrench into the mix. Like the one a miscreant threw into my great grandfather’s oilwell to disable it.  (A true story) They don’t make it easy to  disable their entrenched AI bots and while their wrenches are mostly just annoying, some make it impossible to produce, clean, innovative and imaginative human writing free of artificial intelligence. Their main problem? They aren’t human.

A Cultural Milestone

The $70 million JOHN F. KENNEDY CENTER for the Performing Arts opened on Septemer 8, 1971. The first piece performed was Leonard Bernstein's Mass, which Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had asked the composer to write in memory of JFK.

Designed by American architech, Edward Durell Stone, the center represents a PUBLIC-PRIVATE partnership. History of the Kennedy Center here.

The Rooster's Fate

 Part 2

The rooster struts like a king, high-stepping his fiefdom and puffed up with self-importance. But should a hawk glide overhead, he’s the first to run for cover. The flock crowds together in mass squawking confusion, the chaos of a blitzkrieg, the theater full of smoke. Chickens are vulnerable but they aren’t stupid. They have a highly developed sixth sense when it comes to the hawk flying overhead.

Now, back to the rooster in question from Part I (below), you couldn’t turn your back on him or he’d stab you in the ankle with his spurs. Grown large over time and covered with keratin, they were sharp as spears. He was horny as a goat. As soon as we opened the door to the coop, the hens rushed out to grab the first worm or the unsuspecting grasshopper, but he’d jump on them in dizzying succession, servicing the flock of fifty within a minute. We often wondered, how much fun could that be?

 WILSON

One of our customers taught middle school, and she had a 6-egg incubator in the classroom. The kids loved watching the process, typically 21 days, from the first movement inside the egg, to a crack in the shell, to the chick emerging wet and dazed. Her success rate was phenomenal until the year only one hatched from the incubator. The children grew fond of him and named him Wilson from the Tom Hanks film, the lone survivor. But as Wilson sprouted the early markings of a rooster nobody wanted to take him home, and she asked us if we’d take him back.

At the time we were minus a rooster as the old keratin-laden maniac had met his match at the sawed-off end of a golf club after he jumped on the back of a 5-year-old. We liked having a rooster, the sound of crowing at the full moon in the middle of the night and at the first streak of day, so we said yes. We met her in town and she handed over the box with the silent weight of Wilson inside.

Wilson was mannerly, not as "puffed up" as  his predecessor. He did his mating in gentlemanly fashion. A discerning rooster, he even let them forage first and pull worms from the wet soil before he’d jump on their backs. 

Once a hen nabbed a frog and Oh! the commotion! The entire flock on her heels as she raced around the enclosure to guard her treat. They all wanted a piece of that frog, but Wilson just bobbed his way calmly along the poultry fence looking for his own treat.

Then came the summer of the mink.

One morning we found a hen dead and gutted inside the coop. The next morning, another. We set traps outside the poultry fence, suspecting a mink, but a mink is too wily to be tempted by a trap, regardless of the bait.

Then one morning it was poor Wilson, bloodied and torn, feathers everywhere as if he’d put up a good fight, guarding the hens. We buried Wilson next to Malcolm, our adopted cat that had spent his evenings outside the fence watching the way a cat watches, and we wonder now if that’s why we never had a mink problem until he died of old age.

The rest of that summer, our chickens were picked off one-by-one, then two-by-two; sometimes nothing left but piles of feathers and a stray bloodied limb. In spite of the traps set and the holes in the floor we patched and reinforced, the mink always found a way in until there were only six left. We gathered the six up one night when they were roosting (crowded together in a corner of the roost staring fretfully  at the floor) and took them down the road to my sister’s coop where they at least stood a chance.

Later that fall, when I was cutting grass for the last time, I noticed something black jutting out of the grass by the ditch. As I went over to investigate, I realized it was one wing from a Black Australorp pointed at the sky. All that remained of a flock of fifty and one rooster named Wilson.

 

 

 

THE TALE OF WILSON

     Once upon a time there was a rooster who didn’t have a name. But this isn’t about him, and don’t assume a tale about a flock of chickens is boring. Their behavior mirrors ours, which may be alarming but never boring. The chicken mentality is to flock together, as the old saying goes, but should one prove inferior, of smaller stature say, or harbor a deformity, perhaps a different sheen of feather, or the chicken equivalent of a stammer (the babbled squawk), any sign of weakness, the other hens will peck at her relentlessly until she develops an open sore. Once they smell blood, it’s over until she is defeathered, cowed, and literally pecked to death.

to be continued........

When We Were Mad or Feeling Sad . . .

 

Dad said Smile!
Hard to smile when feeling bad
But he’d insist
Smile!
It felt invasive

I wanted to be mad!
But hard to stay mad when forced to smile.
I don’t know if that was right 
But I never forgot it
Did I.

Today at dVerse, the pub where poets hang out, we were asked to write a Quadrille (a poem of exactly 44 words) which includes the word smile, in any of its forms. We need more smiles nowadays so I repeated it three times to make it stick. Now visit the poets pub for more smiles, from Nat King Cole to Tim McGraw to Charles Bukowski. 

COVER REVEAL

This is the cover for my new novel, BLACK RIVER, to be published on July 27th by Unsolicited Press. It's dark, ominous feel is exactly what I was envisioning for this story. 

What do you think??

Steps in the Publishing Process

 After the copyediting and the proofreading and the laborious task of cutting a few thousand words, which while painful can be invigorating, you finally get an ISBN number. I got mine three days ago. At a writer's converence a long time ago, an agent of some renown was the speaker and she said, "You don't have a book until you have an ISBN number. Call it a manuscript or a work-in-progress, or the next great American novel! But don't call it a book.

I never forgot that. So, I take great pride (and even the second time around, it feels momentous) to say I have an ISBN number. Along with that came the rest of the technical data, list price, print run, book size, and pub date. 

Next up for me here is the cover reveal which I plan to post tomorrow. It's dark and ominous and I hope piques your interest. You will let me know, won't you?

Over and Out. 

p.s. gotta take down the Christmas tree and haul it out to the porch with its strung popcorn and dried cranberries for the birds. Repurposing it thus makes me feel less guilty for having hauled it out of the woods.