Publishing Changes in 2026

 

My first book on the shelves at Barnes & Noble in 2020.

In response to changes in the publishing and bookseller marketplaces over the last year there has been a strategic reorganization of my ties with certain book sellers. This realignment is also about readers having the easiest access to my books at the best price. Inflation has increased prices on the backend of the industry with higher printing and distribution costs eating away at author royalties over the past year. I have been mindful that substantial price increases are unwelcome news to readers and I have done my best to keep my books priced at a reasonable value.

In May, I severed direct ties with Barnes & Noble and Apple Books. My books may still be ordered through Barnes & Noble or found in select store locations, but they are distributed by Amazon to Barnes & Noble. With that in mind, it is easiest to order direct from Amazon for the best price and fastest shipping. The hedge fund owned Barnes & Noble has unfortunately taken a more adversarial approach to indie writers and publishers in the last year under its latest CEO. That same CEO has also said that he would be willing to sell AI generated books and that is a slap in the face to all writers who are committed to writing the best books they can for readers. He has since tried to backtrack on his statements, but the truth is out there.

My decision to end my publishing relationship with Apple was after an assessment of their minuscule share of the book retail market. Their limited reach was no longer worth the effort and resources to maintain that relationship.

My new arrangement with Amazon means that Ebook versions of all my books are now exclusive to Amazon Kindle.

If you have enjoyed my books please share them and tell people about them. Every writer, no matter how great or small, writes to be read. Also, I ask readers to be kind enough to submit authentic reviews and ratings on Amazon.

Thank you to my readers for your time and understanding. I am hard at work on my next novel. I may also have a surprise for later this year. 

Cross my heart,

Chris M. Vise

The Half and The Whole

The 1980s. Photos by my mother.

 

He would have made fun of me for this with a sardonic grin slashing his face. The quip would have been witty and mostly meant in good fun. He would have said that I could do this better than I am. That is okay, I would have deserved it.
 

I would have called him a pretentious snob and he was sometimes. In a moment we would have argued about which Japanese car was the best. He always said it was Mazda, he had one of those before the Mustang. The Mustang that stomped me racing down Marietta Highway. I would have defended my Datsun Z, it was prettier, sleeker and it was mine. Teenage pride and stupidity in a double helix. We thought we knew it all and we knew nothing.

Saturday morning, I put the peanut butter jar in the kitchen sink instead of the pantry. I made coffee without water. It was that kind of shock that cracks up the icebergs of sleep and messes with the timeline of waking life. Who cares about a winter storm on the way or whether your socks match?

He went on to a great life and it is terrible for his family to lose him. His life and happiness were too short and that is not okay. What do you say? The longer you live, the shorter your time seems to become?

This feels like an epilogue at the end of a book and it sort of is. He was half the character of Elliot in my books. He was also a real whole person in my life and many others. 

The last time we spoke was too long ago, when he was in New York and it went poorly. Our problem was irreconcilable. I should have left the last memory of him at graduation on the football field, not that that was great either, when I turned and walked away after that conversation. That is okay too, it has to be. 

I cannot be selfish or possessive of an old friend. This is not about me. What thoughts I have are the equivalent of memories shared in the dim passages of a funeral home with neutral wallpaper. Have a seat on the imitation Victorian sofa next to the dusty fake flowers, it might comfort you. A man in a suit with a carnation pinned to his lapel will fetch you a paper cup of water. It was his life that was lost. I just picked up the echoes. It mattered, his life and death, it mattered a helluva lot. I could say more, but most of the important words have already been written and were hung in the warm air of a June night on a Paulding County football field. There are no regrets. I remember those stupid times, those great times. I remember him as the best friend I did not deserve, but he was lost long ago between the couch cushions of time. 

"Chris, don't be as maudlin as an NBC after-school special," he might have said while opening his trombone spit valve on my shoe. "Now, can I borrow a dollar for the concession stand?"

He died on a Wednesday. He was 53. That is not okay and that is the whole of it.

 

2025 Review: Preppies In The Snow

Naughty and nice are not mutually exclusive. Photo by me, Greensboro, Georgia.

More people I have known died in 2025. Is that too blunt or too obvious? It is not a mystery that the older I become, the more it happens and that is the logical and detached way to approach it. The longer life lasts the more it resembles a classic BMW in need of repairs beyond the routine maintenance, but the backfire of death is no less of a surprise each time it is heard. Preppies in the snow put their hands up to cover their ears and wait.

Too many people have died too young. Dear Generation X, what are you doing ?

I read the obituaries and tried to reconcile the adult to the kid I knew. I am often surprised to read the twists and turns of what people became. People do change, or maybe I never knew some of them that well past the superficial observations in a red brick school in a country town. A boy pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, twirled his number two pencil and did multiplication on his fingers. A teenage girl leaned back in a rocking chair and laughed too hard on the wrong beat as she tried to grasp the conversation of adults. What did we learn?

Funerals are the wrinkles on the face of a life. Gray hairs in the mirror are the honest rebels stealing from the self-image that mistakenly thinks you could still pass for thirty. Forty? Not even. Whatever the kids are listening to and whatever slang they are inventing is whatever the kids are listening to and saying. Translators are not made for that duty. You still think 2006 was a week ago as you tune into 99X or River 97 and drum your fingers on the steering wheel to Everytime You Go Away by Paul Young. You squint at the red light that is poorly timed and notice that the restaurant that was there on the corner your entire life is now a vape shop and tattoo parlor serving burritos without a permit and when did they build that Dollar General? Only yesterday your child was six and you were late for soccer practice.

The end of a year always makes us consider time and where it went. The mind has difficulty with time's salamander slick and slippery nature.

 

Andrew McCarthy in 1987's Mannequin.

Damn the changes, damn the politics, damn the numbing disease of cheap nostalgia and damn it all to hell, but I am thankful that my waist size is still a thirty. Now the light is green, the radio plays Starship's Nothing's Gonna Stop Us and you want to believe it. You are convinced. Traffic flows like it did before millions moved here to ruin paradise and Andrew McCarthy sure was pretty in Mannequin. You strain your voice singing, “We can build this dream together.” You swear you did not once tell that minor piece of trivia in a Thomas Drive bar in Panama City that the lead singer, Mickey Thomas, was from Cairo, Georgia. That is Cairo pronounced like the syrup and not the city in Egypt.

My 2025 was like sitting down to eat at a favorite restaurant, eating my favorite foods and leaving full but not satisfied. I do not know what it was about this year, but it lacked novelty. There were new sights, sounds, places and aches in the joints. I was not bored; that seems to be a condition I never experience, but perhaps I became immune to the news, the messed-up weather, confused flowers and the next batch of woods toppled for luxury apartments over a Panda Express. Gas was cheaper and I spent an hour looking for the ear hair trimmer. The year was over before I knew it.

At fifty-two, I noticed my age like a phone notification that I could not swipe away. I felt a little slower, less nimble and it took me longer to recharge. It now took me two cups of coffee and a handful of Costco supplements before my brain began to percolate in my skull. Silence for the first hour of a day was a requirement or I became the grumpy old man who I never wanted to imitate.

Home Away From Home in Fort Lauderdale. Photo by me.

The secret “home away from home” in Fort Lauderdale was sold this year. It was a unique and special place for sixteen years. I will miss talking to the lizards on the patio, curious stray cats and morning coffee walks to Sebastian Street Beach. I doubt we will find another place like it.

Novel 4 (it really does have a title) came along nicely from January to December. It is something new, something current and has nothing to do with me. There are always so many miles in my year, on foot and by car and do not think that has not been an influence on me. Novel 4 is the first book I did not begin writing in Fort Lauderdale. I had a notebook of ripe ideas and then sentences formed in my head on a cold day on the square in Gainesville in January with a stomach full of barbecue. The characters Adam, Hastings and Evan were born without the need for painkillers.

Weirdest moment:

Standing on the shady side of a street in Warner Robins outside a restaurant. That middle Georgia heat and humidity had stolen the birdsong and my patience. A car creeped up to me and with the sun reflected on the windows and I could not see inside. A scratchy voice called, “Hey white boy.” I looked without looking and gripped my phone a little tighter. The voice called out again, “Hey white boy,” and again I ignored it. My eyes moved behind my sunglasses and I widened my stance. I was not a boy except for maybe in the way some southerners mean it. Three more times the voice called with the same words. Trouble and I was no fool. The car went into reverse and backed away with the possible intention of hiding the tag.

Favorite moment:

Watching the fog in Normaltown in February. Yes, it is more than just a lyric in the B52's Deadbeat Club. 2025 was still goo, shapeless, untethered and iridescent. I could have been in any moment in my life when winter was spooling off into a gray pile of yarn. Maybe I was drifting in the early 90s with a hole in the sleeve of my sweater and wearing a barn jacket and boots. There was a whiff of Polo from the green bottle in the air. A water tower was the appearing and disappearing UFO down the street. I was happy.

Worst moment:
Sitting in a Johns Creek Hospital room and waiting with my grip on the arms of a plastic chair. Helplessness bred in hospitals is the worst.

Best Festival:

Flannery O'Connor's grave. Photo by me, October 2025. 

I went to too many. It was a tie between Athfest and that one down in Milledgeville where I hunted down the grave of Flannery O'Connor. Death was on my mind at every turn this year or so it seemed.

My favorite movie:

Eddington. It satirized the times better than any other movie that tried. It was smart and the only movie that made me laugh out loud.

My favorite new to me music:

The White Birch album by Codeine. It may have come out in 1994, but I had not listened to it until this year. I found it by way of Slint and Shipping News.

 

Cheap nostalgia at $20. My actual Bon Jovi ticket from 1989.

There is no singular defining moment to a year, the same as there is no precise moment that defines a life. To follow a path in the woods, return a smile, accept an invitation, or jump from a window and roll to the ground, life equalizes the regrets and the joys. News readers, nervous funeral orators, biographers, politicians, historians, TikTok influencers and novelists will lie to you. Maybe, if I am going to lie, then it was the Bon Jovi concert at Lakewood in 1989 when I held a flickering lighter in the air like a torch held in my sixteen-year-old hand to I'll Be There For You, but I am drowsy from the decades of remembering those tight jeans and how he was not. A previous lesson learned and only reinforced. All of life goes into the dryer the same as all of it went into the washer. Moments are agitated, churned and rinsed in the same spins until it is a soup of consciousness. They lived, they died and some of it was good, better than it should have been and what more can anyone want besides more time?

What do you do with a used-up and expired year? Nothing really. You go to bed, wake up and open the next year. The Christmas tree comes down slower than it went up and goes back into the attic. The mind and the hand learn to write a different number. In a year, the preppies in the snow will come inside and gather around the fireplace again cradling whatever is the trendy drink.

 

Monticello, Georgia. Photo by me, September 2025.

2025 is the sunset on the hood of a car speeding faster than it used to; you cannot have it again. 2026 is a missed call from an unknown number.

Jump scare. Yours truly. I keep Rabbit Tobacco Field dim to avoid scaring myself. Mood lighting is your friend. December 2025.

Merry Christmas, happy holidays and have the best 2026 that you can.

And finally it is Preppies In The Snow. Ralph Lauren and Vidal Sassoon would be proud. Last Christmas by WHAM!

---

Addendum 

All dressed in black, he won't be coming back
Save your tears, you've got years and years
The pains of seventeen's
Unreal they're only dreams...

As I was putting this post to bed and proofreading I learned Chris Rea had died. He was not a household name, but there are not many of them in the days of niche entertainment and the absence of a shared cultural reality. If you are a Gen X kid/fortunate 70s child you would have heard Fool If You Think It's Over in the summer of 1978 on Top 40 Radio. I first heard it on Atlanta's Z-93 in my mother's Camaro and sliding around on the cold leather backseat of my father's Cadillac through the eighties on B98.5. We had a copy of it in our music collection. I filed the song away as a meaningful one of my childhood. I loved the song then and still do.

When I was writing Dweller On The Boundary it was one of the primary songs I used to manipulate myself into the emotional headspace needed to go there. My books always have a soundtrack. I listened to it on repeat along with Never Gonna Let You Go by Sergio Mendes (for the worst memories), Bread's If, Boz Scaggs' We're All Alone (probably one of the songs for my funeral - just sayin'), The Greatest Love of All by George Benson (the best version and it will make you cry), Sailing by Christopher Cross, King of Pain and Wrapped Around Your Finger from The Police, Steal Away by Robbie Dupree, Supertramp's The Logical Song, Gordon Lightfoot's If You Could Read My Mind and others before writing and during breaks. I abused the hell out of myself to write that book.

Thank you for the music and memories. Chris Rea was 74.

Time Is A Wild River

 

There was no meeting with an old lover in a grocery store as a piano softly played and the snow did not turn to rain in 2024. There was the potential to meet an old lover as we were in the same county in another state. I turned an invitation over and over in my mind as I watched boats on the canals of Fort Lauderdale. I crossed the Everglades, still turning it over when I stopped in his county. I withheld the invitation and neither did we happen upon each other through a chance encounter. The arbitrary boundaries on the map that compressed us into the same few square miles were not strong enough to force a meeting.

Dan Fogelberg's song is nice enough, but as much as songs may sometimes underline our reality, they do not create it.

 

I did speak with an old lover a few times this year. I wanted his side, his recollections and then after he read an advance copy of Shadow's Gravity, I wanted his opinion. Had I gotten enough right about us? His verdict was that I had in the condensed space there was for him. He said I made him sound too beautiful, but he was and still is. He invited me to meet him on a levee again, to watch the sky, talk about the future and spar over George Michael. He vowed not to slap me the next go-around. I rubbed my cheek and I chided him that I had not drowned.

 

There were deaths among my family and I saw some relatives who I had not seen in too long of a time. Life is filled with gaps and silences as much as we may say we are busy filling that time with the noise of everyday living.

My favorite moments this year were meeting my great nephew a few times and watching my nephew get married. I am not much of an advice giver, but I wished him good luck.

 

I loafed, gardened, finished writing the end of the Aviary Hill Series, read other writers, listened to music new and old, swam in the ocean (too far out as per usual), hiked and walked more miles than I could ever write about.

Carter campaign memorabilia on display at the Carter Center in Atlanta. Photos by me, March 2016.

Goodbye, President Jimmy Carter. Thank you to him for helping to preserve the Chattahoochee River.

 

At the end of this year, I kept asking myself where the time had gone, not just 2024 but all of my fifty-one years. I reflected and remembered what I wrote in Dweller On The Boundary: time is a wild river like one I swam in as a boy or watched beside the Indian mounds. Time is downstream from where I type this and it does not matter. The world keeps on spinning.

 

My favorite new song of 2024 was And Nothing is Forever from the Cure's 2024 album.

My favorite new to me old song for 2024 is Cars and Explosions (1979) by a long ago Atlanta band called The Fans.

I saw so few new films this year and that is unusual for me. My favorite among the limited selection was Sebastian.

The Christmas Spirit Shebang

Catching the Christmas spirit. December 2024. Photo by me.

This has felt like the quickest Christmas season, I thought, as I walked into Rich's, or the shell of what was a Rich's department store until Macy's murdered the Atlanta institution. I will forever have a warm place in my heart for Rich's, the Christmas of 1992, working there and being a part of the team to bring the holidays alive at a local senior living home and dodging Holly under her mistletoe trap. I also would like to relive the late seventies with my grandfather purchasing me chocolate covered peanuts from the bakery at the Cumberland Mall Rich's or the eighties with my mother buying eclairs from the bakery at the Cobb Center store. Yet, those are Christmases past and the scent of expensive leather no longer wafted through the store as I looked at the marble floor.

I have written about so many Christmases from the 1970s through the 2000s which were terrible, strange, oddly funny or weird in all four of my books that you could collectively call them The Art of Bad Christmases Series. I promise, they are fun for the entire family and should be read with a cup of whiskey laced eggnog by the fireplace.

I hear he's nice. December 2024. Photo by me.

 

December 2024. Photo by me.

Monkey Gone To Heaven according to The Pixies. December 2024. Photo by me.

The Christmas of 2024 was tame and could never be used as inspiration for a story in a book and there are no complaints about that. I went to see Christmas light displays, made notes for my next novel and had some satisfying conversations.

I also got sick on the weekend before Christmas. While catching the Christmas spirit among the last minute crowds on Sunday at a mall, I caught a cold. Perhaps I caught it from the foolish man wearing gym shorts in forty degree weather as he trudged by hopefully seeking out a bargain on some pants and underwear.

Tube Socks The Stray Kitty performs.  December 2024. Photo by me.

My nose ran marathons and I had used so much Kleenex that I was Rudolph or an 80s rock star coke fiend without the fun. That was the big mishap this year. There were no family secrets revealed and nothing smelling of reindeer shit came down the chimney; there was no Claxton fruitcake this year either. I napped on Christmas and worked my way through a box of chocolates, not the old and discolored kind my grandmother gave me each Christmas as a kid that resembled something from a litterbox. The neighborhood stray cat visited briefly and performed Stop, Drop and Roll in the rose beds too.

Between naps, cat entertainment, cups of coffee and squirts of nasal spray my thoughts went through Shadow's Gravity, my last novel. I was replaying scenes and I kept getting stuck on how I had described a three-way sex scene as going skiing. I had no embarrassment over it and laughed several times that I had the guts to write honestly about my early twenties. It was the Christmas of the three of us singing RENT's Seasons of Love on repeat so... Rarely do I ever think of a reader's reaction to something I write, but about that particular scene I have. I hope they laughed and that image is permanently burned into their brain.

My mind also pondered The Dead Internet Theory, which is not entirely true, but with AI and bots it seems to be becoming more true by the passing day. If it can take down social media or help create a new and better one then maybe it is not such a bad thing. I miss the 90s internet of Geocities websites and AOL chatrooms on every imaginable topic. The internet had hope and Encarta! I still have a working AOL email address from the 90s which I check daily, radioxguy@aol.com, and I am never surrendering it.

The day after Christmas, I am glad the whole “shebang”, a fine word my mother often used and I never hear anymore, is over. Also, I swear I watched the music video for WHAM's Last Christmas in 4K only twice this year. The amount of hairspray that was used in the making of that video would be enough to fill an oil tanker.

Onward to 2025.

 

I Have Seen That Face Before

Oh...

When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen's off with her head
Remember what the dormouse said
Feed your head

A mugshot is that moment for the public when a crime becomes real and a criminal is made. For the accused, it probably feels like a ceremonial performance as part of having their finger prints taken and the handcuffs placed on them. Perhaps it does not seem genuine until the bars close behind them and they are left with only their potentially guilty thoughts and a filthy shared toilet. It might emotionally sink in for them when they have been caught and the game is up. The mugshot is enough for the rest of us to understand that this is official without a need to experience the rest of it.

I have seen numerous mugshots of people I have written about in my books. Some of them, with multiple mugshots, were expected and then there was one I saw this week that shocked me. I might have expected it if it were Rowe (he has several mugshots) or English Stan (he has none). The person staring ahead in the orange jumpsuit and bad lighting with a scowl I saw for years was the real person behind one of the major characters in all of my books.

It seemed impossible. It seemed ludicrous.

Side by side I compared older photographs of them to the mugshot taken in 2023 and even overlaid them in Photoshop. It was the identical bent ear and the same messed-up eyebrow. Not that I should have needed more convincing once I looked into their eyes, I still did not believe it. I scoured the internet for two days to triple-check the information. It was as though I tried to convince myself that the tsunami I faced was only a ripple on an infinity pool caused by the breeze of a palm fan. This could not be.

There was some reason for disbelief, the last I saw of them was in the 1990s, when they resembled the dorky and youthful person I knew. They were not this scruffy, wrinkled, sun-blotched person who had let themselves go. Was I wrong? I still questioned it despite the exact match of their first, middle and last names and their date of birth.

Something else that threw me off and gave me the biggest doubt was the incorrect information about where they were raised. No, they were not raised in that state; they were raised in Paulding County. I was sure of it; I had known them since elementary school. I had slept in their bed, worn their clothes and much, much more. There was no evidence then or now that this person had a doppelganger.

My fingers kept clicking and my browser kept digging deeper and deeper down a rabbit hole. I learned that they had lied about where they were raised to cover their tracks. That lie was part of a larger scheme lasting two decades.

Emotionally it sank in for me, the information was correct. I was left dizzy in a state of unexpected disappointment. How had I gotten this person so wrong or had they changed? To call it a shock would be to call losing an arm in a gory chainsaw accident a minor scrape with a Husqvarna running wide open. Why had this person allegedly committed these felony crimes and potentially spend the rest of their life in prison? I do not understand.

It was not unexpected that the bullies and bad characters that I have written about have all gone on to become criminals of varying degrees. None of them redeemed themselves in adulthood or made the world a better place. Once a bad apple, always that, I suppose, but this person was not a bad apple. This person was one of the people I still held admiration for, albeit with a few misgivings. It was as if a worm had breached the red skin and made them rotten. This moral threshold that everyone of us have, with a few exceptions, that establishes at our most fundamental level what is right and what is wrong, was perforated. They went from an adult with a distinguished career to possibly a felon on multiple counts.

I scrambled my brain looking for markers on the highway of life that might have predicted this outcome for them.

The look in the mugshot is one I recognize when this person is seething with anger. I did see that face from them a few times, but that is not enough to convict them or say that this person will grow up to become a criminal.

I am reminded of a scene between us next to a cow pond in Dweller On The Boundary.  They throw a large rock into the water disturbing the universe. The crows are gathered in the tree tops, pacing and watching. The conversation goes somewhere I do not want. There were signs of something I did not understand in their personality and they, like many people, had a few loose connections, but not once did I believe there was anything other than a shining goodness in them that steered their decisions.

There is also an experience I have withheld about them, but I am compelled to write about it now. It is not included in the first draft of my next novel, but with these new developments, I will work it in. It seemed insignificant in the context of the times and in 1986, but now it makes more sense and takes on a bruising shade of seriousness. It could have some relevance to what became of them.

Some of the other accusations levied against them without being charged yet, but hopefully will if true, are violations of federal law. With the gift of hindsight, I can see the origins of these accusations taking root in the games we played as kids. Those inconsequential make believe games we played then carry stiff consequences if carried out by adults. How could a smart person be so dumb? This person acted like he was Peter Pan, except they knew it was not a game. I have seen the evidence of these accusations as presented by knowledgeable people in this field and it is damning.

Ethically and legally, I cannot write why they were arrested, even if it is a matter of public record or their other shady and dishonorable dealings, for fear of revealing their identity in my books. With these constraints, there is little detail I can write, but it is bad, very bad. The alleged crimes are bad enough that this person's arrest was covered on every local television news broadcast where they live. Not to offer them any defense or to minimize the crimes, but they are not violent or of a sexual nature and instead involved a very planned deception. The justice system affords them the presumption of innocence and in my heart I would like to believe they are innocent, but based on the evidence and patterns of behavior I have learned about, the allegations are probably true. This was not a one-time spur of the moment bad decision by a good person. It was a series of intentional bad choices over a long period of time by someone that had a substantial part in my young life.

I have to think maybe I saw this somewhere buried in their eyes, at the corners of their mouth or in their arrogance behind closed doors, but I did not. They always claimed to know so much about human nature and then they gave into the meaner, more desperate side of it. It upends my view of them in the past, our shared memories, what I have written about them and they are now tainted. 

If a conviction comes down before publication of my next novel, then I will address it in the epilogue, as this book was intended to tie up all of the storylines from this series. Beyond that, I will have no further comments about this person.

Trains, Towers and Time

 

A leaning oak tree questions its existence in the fog. Photo by me, March 2023.

Some people are spring and summer people and others, like me, are fall and winter people. I will gladly accept a gloomy, cool to cold day over a blazing hot and humid day that can occur here in the northern third of Georgia anywhere from April through early October. I compare it to music: I would rather listen to the Cocteau Twins, The Cure, Echo & The Bunnymen, Nirvana or Joy Division than Aerosmith, Poison, Britney Spears, Lady Gaga or whatever passes for the computer-generated pop music these days. Do not get me wrong; I can relish a hot July day dipping my toes into a lake or squeezing hot white Florida sand between my toes, but I love the gray, damp and cozy winters of home much more.

This past March, I experienced the perfect weather day, if such is possible, like it was one of the scenes from my novel Dweller On The Boundary when I lost my dog Raven in the fog. It was an early March day as I went north into the higher elevations of the mountains. The temperatures dropped into the upper forties and drizzle made everything dripping wet. It was the type of weather that makes me want to walk forever or rest my bones by a fireplace and look at old photos.

Better times in Clarkesville, Ga. Photo by me, March 2023.

Take the last train to Clarksville
And I'll meet you at the station
You can be here by four thirty (Train)
'Cause I made your reservation
Don't be slow
Oh, no, no, no
And I don't know if I'm ever coming home.
-The Last Train To Clarksville by The Monkees.

 

The first town I loafed into was Clarkesville, no connection to that 1960s Monkees song Last Train To Clarksville. The Habersham County town of nineteen hundred residents has been bypassed by newer and bigger highways, pinching it off from the eyes and dollars of passing motorists. The last passenger train service, via the Tallulah Falls Railway, ended in 1946. The isolated situation might not make for a thriving economy, but it has preserved the town's character and identity from the newer and more cheaply built development that is devouring much of northern Georgia like a fatal disease.

 

My thoughts are not original on this topic; I share them with the late writer and Atlanta newspaper columnist Celestine Sibley, who lamented the changes during her lifetime in her beloved Sweet Apple in what was then rural North Fulton County. I, like many longtime residents of Georgia, have watched the rolling wooded hills and mountains become parking lots and cul-de-sacs with names that only remind us of the natural landscape that existed before. This is a concern that I have also written about in my novels.

 

Progress only seems to come in one shade and which is newness and not in another, which is better. The zealots of progress would likely disagree, but I could never be convinced that a metal building is more attractive than one made of brick or stone. A patch of kudzu is more attractive to my eyes than most of that ghastly and inhumane plastic-looking crap that is built today for people to live, work and play. In modern design, beauty has been sacrificed for cheap progress.

I might be wrong and overly sentimental too, so think for yourself. Those who are most certain in their opinions are most certainly wrong.

My childhood cookie jar. Photo by me, March 2023.

I poked around a couple of antique/junk shops located in a former textile mill without buying anything. I am now of the age where these kinds of shops are museums of my childhood, filled with objects I grew up with. Sometimes people from the past show up too, but that is another story for another time.

 

The blue/green glass canister above was the exact same one my mother had in my childhood home since the 1970s. My grubby little hands were always prying it open and sneaking cookies before bedtime. I was tempted to open this one and see if it smelled like the homemade oatmeal cookies she made. 

 

It is tempting to buy these unnecessary items and recreate the past. These objects set off a physical tingle and produce a smile, but it would feel wrong to have them again, like reconciling with an ex - you just know it is not going to work out no matter how good they make you feel. It is a fight sometimes to avoid succumbing to nostalgia for objects that were once a part of my life. I do not want to slip on a permanent pair of rose-colored shades that block out the negative realities of the past. Also, I do not bake cookies and have no need for a cookie jar.

 

I touched the smooth glass of the jar but did not open it. I feared disappointment that it would not release the aroma that my mind and heart hoped. My memory was more important to keep intact than to potentially spoil it. I exited the temporary haze of nostalgia and then I left Clarkesville. Stephen King's town of Castle Rock, Maine and that novel of his that I read as a teenager, Needful Things, were on my mind.

The Big Red Apple outside the old Cornelia train station. Photo by me, March 2023.

Cornelia, Ga. Photo by me, March 2023.

 

A stopover in nearby Cornelia had me standing next to a monument of a big red apple and the old train station. I do not associate Cornelia with apples in Georgia, but apparently they grow them and required a large monument to them, maybe to appease the apple gods. Who knows and I am not sure? Since the nineteen eighties, I have associated Georgia's apple industry with Ellijay and Blue Ridge where my family would buy them in the fall and I still do today. 

 

The plaza was empty in Cornelia, as I imagine it is most days; the flags flapped in the breeze, a pink magnolia showed off and the daffodils entertained themselves. No one waited for a train that does not stop there anymore, though Amtrak does make stops in nearby Toccoa and Gainesville. The passenger train that once ran through here went to Clarkesville, Tallulah Falls and into North Carolina. The leftover caboose was a prop for when or if the Instagrammers of the world find Cornelia or for an older person to explain to a child what the big red relic was. 

 

What a fine day it was to stand in the mist as my hands grew cold around my camera. I knew of a place outside Cornelia that I wanted to visit and this seemed like the ideal day to make the detour up there. I had found my destination and no train could take me there.

 

On the edge of the Lake Russell Wildlife Management Area stands a stone tower built in 1937 by the Works Progress Administration for the National Forest Service. To reach it, you drive a narrow paved road through a residential neighborhood planted on the side of Chenocetah Mountain. The tower is fifty-four feet high at an elevation of one thousand eight hundred and thirty feet above sea level. On a clear day, from the top of the tower, you could see for miles. It served the same original purpose as the metal fire tower atop Elsberry Mountain that was behind my childhood home: spotting forest fires.

This was not a clear day; this was a perfect weather day.

The fog on Chenocetah Mountain. Photo by, March 2023.

A tree indicated the way. Photo by me, March 2023.

I parked on the side of the road and could not see the tower further up the mountain through the fog. The crunch of gravel underfoot was the only sound as I went uphill. The atmosphere was eerie and the experience thrilling that I came on the perfect day. I was a boy again in the woods. There was no other world except where I was at that moment, which blurred with the past. It happens every time I set foot on a wooded trail: I am inspired. Dweller On The Boundary was born on a trail lined with Chinese privet on a hot summer's day.

Photo by me, March 2023.

Chenocetah Tower emerged in a clearing at the top, behind the gray sentinels, awaiting orders for when to begin to grow leaves again. The tower appeared like a sweet memory among the often mundane and trivial thoughts of the everyday that populate Facebook and the television news. Tell me what you really think or what is important and not some politically inspired pose for attention.

Photo by me, March 2023.

A pleasing land of drowsy-hed it was,
Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye;
And of gay castles in the clouds that pass,
Forever flushing round a summer-sky.
The Castle of Indolence, Canto I, VI by James Thomson in 1748. Also quoted at the opening of Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

The fog dressed the landscape in a cloak that distorted time. A person could have stood in that spot for almost the last one hundred years and it would have looked similar. In that distortion, I imagined myself calling out for my lost childhood dog, Raven, into the wall of gray. The conditions were the same as that 1980s day that I sank into the ground of Rabbit Tobacco Field. This was not a nostalgic trance, but history rattling my bones as if I needed to remember.

Photo by me, March 2023.

 

This was like walking through one of my stories or how I imagined the landscapes to be in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. If the Headless Horseman rode past, I could not see him in the dense water droplets suspended in the air. Raven could have been out there too with her jingling vet tag, but I would not know; all sound was muffled.

Photo by me, March 2023.

 

Photo by me, March 2023.

Photo by me, March 2023.

I could not climb the tower as much as I wanted to do just that. The blue door was locked tight to keep the vandals from having their way with it. The wood and stone were spared from high school sweethearts pledging eternal love and devotion on it. The tower is only open to the public one weekend a year, during the Cornelia apple festival. 

 

I admired the tower at ground level and thought about how structures of this quality are not commonly built anymore and have not been during all of my fifty years. I like the older architecture and craftsmanship, but do not confuse that with my liking older times better. My admiration for old buildings probably was spawned when I first saw the stone house of my great-grandparents in Tennessee as a child or visiting the Biltmore Estate in Asheville in the 1980s. I simply saw that when it came to buildings, the older ones appealed to me.

 

When my twenties arrived, I chose to live in some old places: a former Atlanta Ford Factory built in the 1920s and a Victorian mansion from the 1880s in Louisville, Kentucky. Living in places that old is living inside history and sharing them with the unseen past, which is kind of similar to living in an eternal fog. Sometimes in those places I caught a whiff of the scent of the past or a glimpse of it darting around a corner, but I never came face to face with it as I did as a young boy in my backyard underneath an oak tree or again much later in life.

Whatever ghosts are, I believe in them. They can exist in foggy woods and fields, creaking mansions, antique stores, words in a book, in a mind and in a heart. I carry them around with me, write about them, sometimes encounter them and try not to be haunted by them.

Photo by me, March 2023.

 

Photo by me, March 2023.

There on the foggy mountaintop, the time distortion was strong and I traveled on the perfect weather day. Despite my possible resemblance to Ichabod Crane, no pumpkins were hurled my way as I stood next to the tower with cold cheeks and damp hair. Raven still ran through my memories as black as her namesake. Time travel is not only an H.G. Wells story or that television show I loved as a kid, Voyagers!, but a real phenomenon and that can be achieved by closing one's eyes. The keys are imagination and memories. A person can go to any place or time that they can imagine or remember, but there are reservations to be considered. The past is as set as the stone in the tower and cannot be changed, as some might want. However, time travel can influence the present and future if you allow it, so be wise in making those choices.

New Hope A Place Called Childhood

 

New Hope Cemetery in Paulding County, Georgia. April 2023. Photo by me.

It could have seemed dramatic, cathartic or life-altering but it was not; however it was significant for me to be able to stop and put my feet on the ground of New Hope, Georgia for the first time in eighteen years.

 

I joked on Facebook before I went to New Hope that I would be playing Bob Seger as loud as I could tolerate as a warning that I was coming. As much as I enjoy Main Street, Against The Wind, Fire Lake, Turn The Page and his other music, I did not listen to Bob Seger; I turned the music off.

 

2005 was the last time I was in New Hope and that was at my childhood home that my father was selling. He had offered to sell it to me two years before, but I had declined. I had no desire to ever live in Paulding County again and especially on the same hill that I grew up. In those eighteen years I never returned to New Hope and though I returned last week to the community I came from, I have never returned to what I called Aviary Hill, my childhood home.

 

Coming through a traffic light in 2023 where there was no traffic light before, or any in New Hope, was disorienting. I had already passed a Publix shopping center and a drug store when none of those types of businesses would have ever had been dreamed of in the community of New Hope when I knew it. There was traffic too and there was none of that before. Who were these people, where had they come from and where were they going?

I pulled into one of the few places I recognized, New Hope Cemetery; at least they had not raised the dead or paved them over and were still in the same spot. With the passage of so much time it was difficult to find the islands of my memory in the sea of change that has flooded New Hope.

 

April 2023. Photo by me.

 

This cemetery I wrote about in my novel, Uncivil X. I had walked every inch of this ground in the early 1990s looking for Oliver and hoping not to find him. This was the first time I was back in this cemetery on a warm April late morning. I was the only living person there. A few minutes were needed for me to get my bearings and not feel like ghosts waited to surprise me from behind the headstones. 

 

April 2023. Photo by me.

April 2023. Photo by me.

April 2023. Photo by me.

April 2023. Photo by me.

April 2023. Photo by me.

Despite my family history in New Hope, I have not a single ancestor buried here. As I have written before, this graveyard is not the prettiest graveyard I have ever seen. Yet, on this visit in the spring, among the sprawl of now suburban Atlanta, it was pretty in its weedy, simple and familiar way. The headstones leaned a little more with time and weather as a nod to lives we have known. If there was a place in New Hope that I could not feel like an outsider or that the place was not secretly sinister, then it was here.

As I walked, a little of the younger me returned and I shed some of the judgement that the eyes of the older me had about New Hope.

 

The American Civil War battle in New Hope. April 2023. Photo by me.

An American Civil War monument on the road I grew up in New Hope. April 2023. Photo by me.

An American Civil War trench dug in the 1860s on the road where I grew up in New Hope. The bloody history of my community was inescapable like the humidity in July. April 2023. Photo by me.

 

New Hope is a place of monuments and markers between the Dollar Tree and gas stations because so much terrible history occurred there; history included in my books. It was called The Hell Hole for the bloody and intense American Civil War battle in May 1864. Then in April 1977 it became the site of the deadliest commercial aviation accident in the United States, at the time, when Southern Airways flight 242 crashed into the middle of New Hope. I came from a community where tragedy was baked into the Georgia red clay underneath me and rose to become stone monuments.

April 2023. Photo by me.

April 2023. Photo by me.

April 2023. Photo by me.

This was my first time seeing the new monument dedicated to the victims and survivors of the Southern Airways 242 crash. The plane crash may no longer be the deadliest commercial crash in United States, but it is still the deadliest in Georgia. Surrounding the base of the obelisk are the names of the fatalities and the survivors. I was surprised and gratified to see how well the monument was constructed and tasteful it was. It was certainly the most elegant structure in modern day New Hope.

I had just turned four when the plane crashed a mile from my house, but I have no memory of that day or the events after. I grew up hearing about the crash in New Hope, seeing the visible scars and reading about it. The crash always felt like an open wound when I was young because it was so recent then and little ever changed until the time I left in 1995. My father told me stories of how he went to the crash site and my mother told me a story of how difficult it was to get around in the aftermath with roads closed and media from around the globe coming to our tiny community. Others, old enough to remember April 1977, have told me their memories since my first novel was published.

April 2023. Photo by me.

April 2023. Photo by me.

That was my elementary school in the above photos. Seeing my old school made me happy. I thought about baseball games, the smell of the cleaning supplies that the school smelled like every Monday morning and other fond memories. Seeing that school, which to me was the heart of New Hope, was like being eight years old and invincible again.

 

I have written in my books about how the school was directly across the road from the cemetery and how that added to the creepiness of the 1980 Halloween festival where I stumbled and fell on the gravel with an untied shoe at Robin's feet. In so many ways New Hope delivered me to him or him to me.

 

The views above are from the rear of the school. It was W.C. Abney School when I attended first through sixth grades there, but it is some other school now. The building remains, the name is gone, the memories I can still visualize. 

 

The buildings were the same except that the unpleasant dark gray paint was white and that was the new addition to the school in my years. It housed the first and second grades and the cafeteria that doubled as a gym on the rainy days during physical education. The original red brick portion of the school was for third through sixth grades. The classrooms had walls of windows then, but unfortunately children are no longer allowed to see sunshine and they have been covered over in beige painted wood that resembles a prison. We enjoyed watching it snow out those windows, watching cars of parents line up at the end of the day and daydreaming or exploring our imaginations out those windows. The closing of the windows seems like a closing of opportunity, freedom and minds. How can a child be inspired when a child cannot even be allowed to watch the rain slide down the panes of glass during math?

 

Wherefore art thou old Rock Store? April 2023. Photo by me.

The two landmarks that most knew New Hope by when I was growing up were the two churches that sat facing each other at the end of my road. I wrote about the two churches and walking past them on my way home and they still stand today exactly as they did before. Looking at the two churches was the closest I came on my visit to actually feeling the past. 

 

The Rock Store for which that road in the photo is named after is no more, just like when I wrote about how subdivisions were named after the natural beauty they plowed under. My road, Bobo Road, passes between the two churches and there was no traffic light then as there was no need for one, not enough people lived or passed through for it to be necessary.

April 2023. Photo by me.

This is the vantage point from Bobo Road. The gravel lot where I stood to take the photo is where my father's mistress would wait for him to pass after he visited us at my house in the 1980s. I did not write about this story, but I could not help but think of it as I stood there decades later. One day my mother caught my father's mistress parked at the church and a car chase ensued. My brother was in the car with my mother and he finally persuaded her to stop the pursuit. The mistress got away that time and the close call did not stop her from hanging out at the church parking lot waiting on my father.

I did not write about another story involving this parking lot. I was desperate to find a way to limit my time on the school bus when I was fifteen years old. I had to get away from the kids that did not like me including Rowe, these were kids that threatened me and were dangerous. I knew how to drive, had plenty of experience on our property and the highways and was confident in my abilities. I decided that I would start driving our Cadillac down to the church on my learner's permit on school mornings alone and without permission. I would park the car there then walk to my elementary school and catch the bus to the high school. In the afternoon, I got off the bus from the high school at the churches, got in the Cadillac and drove home. I could do this because I would be home before my brother or parents returned in the afternoon. I got away with it for a month, until I came up the driveway of Aviary Hill to find my brother had come home from work early. He told me that he thought the Cadillac, which would become my first car, had been stolen and that he was about to report it when he saw me arrive. My brother and I rarely agreed to keep things between us in our youth or shared a secret, but I begged him to make a deal with me for his silence. I agreed to stop driving illegally and to wash his car for a month for not telling our parents about what I had done. I went back to walking home from New Hope after school until the day I turned sixteen.

 

Bobo Road. April 2023.

As I wrote about it in my books, I walked the mile home from the two churches every afternoon during seventh, eighth, ninth and most of tenth grade until I turned sixteen. I wrote about the true stories of my encounter with the ice cream truck driver, The Magazine Game and how I had to walk by Rowe's house.

 

It might sound like an old man's tale, but it really was a mostly uphill walk to my house and then I had to walk up Aviary Hill. I walked it in the rain, the cold and the heat as anything was better than being on that bus even if it exposed me to Rowe. That walk through the tall grass in the ditch was the longest mile I have ever had to walk.

The location of where Rowe tried to kill me in the 1980s. April 2023. Photo by me.

The entrance to this new housing subdivision that did not exist then and was just beyond the Georgia Forestry Commission branch office was the exact spot Rowe tried to kill me. The ditch was much steeper then and below it, through the woods, was a logging road, that was how I escaped him that day. If I had not known those woods blindfolded I might not be here today.

 

It was surreal to pass, at this very spot, an oncoming ambulance with its emergency lights flashing and siren sounding as I made my first trip down Bobo Road in eighteen years. New Hope still had warnings for me after all this time.

April 2023. Photo by me.

At first glance this appeared the same as it had, but out of sight to the left are many houses in what was dense woods. The road is beginning to enter the curve that hid my house on the right hand side of the road. That is Elsberry Mountain Road to the right that ran behind my house and Aviary Hill. It was a dirt road then with patches of gravel scattered on the first part of it before it became an abandoned logging road that led to Elsberry Mountain. More than once my school bus became stuck in the mud on that road; Paulding County had more miles of dirt road than any other county in the state of Georgia.

Blackout Log to the right. April 2023. Photo by me.

On the right is part of the reason I had not returned to New Hope for almost two decades - up that bank and in those woods is where the real Blackout Log chapter takes place in my novel Dweller On The Boundary. I felt sick passing it and regretted driving through. That hill was my favorite place to play with my Star Wars action figures as a boy. The creek that ran behind my house and across our property also crosses underneath the road at this point. Before Blackout Log, in the late 1970s and early 1980s we played there often as there was a concrete tunnel under the road where the creek flowed. It was the best place to catch frogs and the tunnel was always cool in the summer though kind of creepy. The creeks banks were thick with ferns and it reminded me of where Yoda had exiled himself on planet Dagobah. I even had one of those brown plastic Star Wars Dagobah sets that resembled a tree stump and was where Yoda lived. This was where I always played with the Dagobah and Yoda until Blackout Log.

My driveway up Aviary Hill is just in view on the right of the road. Cross Creek subdivision, or what I called Cannon Creek in my books, is approaching on the left.

 

Aviary Hill. Photo by me, April 2023.

 

That was my driveway up Aviary Hill to where my childhood house still sits. The house remains hidden much as it did through my twenty-two years of living there. You have to look quick to see it or you will pass by not knowing it was there. The roadside is just as wooded as it was and the only changes are that the gate has been removed, the mailbox has been switched to the opposite side and the grounds seems to be less cared for than when I did it. Also, I never let the pine straw collect on the gravel drive, I raked it off.  In the late 1980s I had planted a row of Piedmont Azaleas on the left bank as you entered the driveway, those are gone now too.

 

 

My feelings on seeing Aviary Hill were mixed. I was partially happy to see it still up there in the trees. I was sad to see it not as loved and lived in by strangers. I have mentioned to people that if the house were torn down, I would not mind. The house has little sentimental value for me. I would hate and be upset for the land to be turned into another subdivision. Part of me knows that one day it is inevitable that there will be no trace of Aviary Hill - I hope that day, if it does come, is after I am gone.  

I saw Robin's house in Cross Creek subdivision and maybe that hurt the most and not for the state of dishevelment that it now exists, but for other reasons - reasons deep inside me like my bones. I could still write a thousand or more stories about him and that house and what went on there. They would be happy stories, loving stories and ones that would be sad. My eyes saw the house and its current state and my mind saw flashes of the past flickering on its hidden screen. If I could only write what I saw, the first image in my mind and it was not his blue eyes, pink lips, a Police poster on the wall - it was something else and I could smell it. I cannot write that, just as I cannot write or say his real name.

 

I kept going, never to stop again.

My grandparent's house. April 2023. Photo by me.

Two houses from mine on the same side of the road was my grandparent's house in Georgia. I wrote about my times there, the holiday parties, spending the nights and sneaking in the back door in costumes to entertain them as a boy nicknamed Sneaky Snake. My grandparents kept the house even though by the mid 1980s they were spending more and more time at their two houses in Decatur County, Tennessee.

My grandfather died in the summer of 1989 when I was sixteen and I have never set foot on that porch again. I ran across those porch boards daily as a boy without a second thought in my head. I was there for Pawpaw to steal my nose, wink at me and watch M*A*S*H. reruns in the afternoon on channel 2 before the news came on. I still hear the television show theme song and I am in that black rocking chair with my feet not reaching the ground and he is sipping his coffee from a cup on a saucer and maybe soaking his feet. As a boy, he was the one adult that I never had an ounce of fear of and he never said a cross word to me - not one - I cannot even say that about my mother. I was a very shy child and it did not seem to matter to him, we could sit together and speak only a few words and it was perfectly natural. He loved his grandchildren, even the odd ones like me.

Today, the house is largely the same from the outside. It was mustard yellow when I knew it in the 1970s and 80s and there was no second floor window, that was an unused attic then. The pea gravel driveway that killed my bare feet in the summers is now concrete. The well shed has been replaced, the gazebo is gone as was the barn and greenhouse in the rear. The gigantic magnolia is gone from the front yard too and some oaks.

 

As a kid, the Cannon Creek Boys and I would throw the magnolia seed pods like grenades at each other. They hurt when they hit you, especially in the face. Robin once dared me, as he often did, to chew and eat the red seeds in the pod. I lived on every word of his and did it. They were bitter and nasty, but I chewed and swallowed to please him - no dare was ever too much. It was gross, but nothing would ever be more gross than swallowing his Skoal Bandit flavored saliva.

 

In the early 1980s the children of the family that once owned my grandparent's house before they purchased it came for a visit. I remember that day though I was not present when they came, I was off in the woods being that boy and heard about it over dinner. The two children were twin girls, but were elderly adults by that time. They wanted to see where they had grown up and not seen for twenty-something years. My grandparents invited them in and they looked around, shared stories and marveled at the changes. The house built in the late 1800s had changed for them. Underneath those changes it was still their home, their past and memories. I wonder how much or if they felt lost sitting in my grandparent's living room with the floor to ceiling windows and columns?

But they stopped. The twins stopped to have their childhood again for an hour or so. I kept going, running the down the red dirt road of my mind - never to stop again.

 

There was a finality about my visit to New Hope, as if I never need to return or see it again. Rabbit Tobacco Field is forever a place in my head and what I call the office where I write these words now. Most of what I saw in New Hope was not the place I was raised or loved; it was some other place, a new place, a different place and not home. This perspective is not limited to New Hope, but to all of Paulding County. The home I loved is forever buried in my books.

 

 

April 2023. Photo by me.

 

One final photo from a little down the road from my grandparent's house. I had played in those woods. This is the Paulding County of today and "the progress." The beauty of the hills is carved up and trucked away, the woods obliterated, the creeks filled with silt and new houses packed closely together in the most inhumane way sprout. This is not the Paulding County I knew or loved, but it is the Paulding County that future residents will come to know. I hope they love living in a place named after what once was. If I could choose the name of this subdivision, I would call it Childhood.