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.

 

The Mid Point of 2025

Happy Fourth of July from Broad Street in Monroe, Georgia. Photo by me, June 2025.

It was during a hiking trip last fall and sitting in a barbecue joint in Gainesville, Georgia when I knew I had enough notes and ideas to begin writing the first draft of a new novel. This realization was a nice change from when I had stood in Micanopy, Florida in September chasing down the ghost of River Phoenix. I was undecided if I was on a wild goose chase or if I was seeking twisted inspiration. Inspiration can come from anywhere I suppose, even from long dead movie stars with bad drug habits. 

The town square of Gainesville, Georgia. October 2024.

After eating, I walked around the square and aired out my thoughts like sheets on a clothes line. I had two people in mind who I had known that I could use as inspiration for characters. One was a prim and proper person and the other was a person who lived below their raising and had wasted their chance at life. These two would be among the foundational characters at the heart of the novel. I decided to set this story primarily in two places I know well, Monroe, Georgia and Athens. River Phoenix and Micanopy, Florida might still figure into this somehow or maybe not, River did spend time in Athens hanging out with Michael Stipe in the 1990s. 

"The bike is the answer." Athens, Georgia. Photo by me, April 2014.

At the mid point of this year, this book is a long way from being finished and I am still writing the first draft. There will be no new book from me in 2025. Other than what I have written above, the only new tease I have for this book might be found in the Eagles song One of These Nights crossed with the mood and themes of the Chris Isaak song Wicked Game. A previous tease can be found in a post here.

 

A week ago, Shadow's Gravity had its one year anniversary and I updated the cover.  

The new cover features a portion of a photo of my mother from the late 1940s when she was a toddler. She was holding on to the back of a parked Mercury and had dropped her toy cat. 

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.

 

Hidden Mountains

 

Photo by me, March 2024.

 

What can happen in thirteen years? I asked myself that question as I stood in front of the statue of Chief Sawnee in late March of this year for the first time in thirteen years. The simple answer is a lot can happen.

It was in the fifties as I arrived at Sawnee Mountain late in the afternoon and it was a perfect hiking day. It was a day to walk through the past for me as I had been to this mountain once on a warm February Saturday in my younger short sleeved thirties. I was taking a weekend off from writing my novel Shadow's Gravity and had somehow not gained a pound from when I was a younger man. I had gained the weight of more experience, perspective, memories and countless miles on my legs. Thirteen years can do a lot to a person and a person can do a lot in thirteen years. I was writing my fourth book, had moved out of the city for good, renovated a house, nearly died in 2012 and so much more.

Photo by me, March 2024.

Photo by me, March 2024.

I started up Sawnee Mountain through the naked hardwoods that reminded me of where I grew up with a mountain behind my house. My mind wandered from the present at the turn of the trail. I was walking miles of memories as much as I was on the stony trail. The trail curved through the woods as life - to unexpected places, with unexpected experiences and unanticipated questions. Sometimes even in a place and in people we thought we knew there are surprises.

Photo by me, March 2024.

Photo by me, March 2024.

Photo by me, March 2024.

Life and its counterpart death always have a presence in the world underlining our existence in permanent ink and teaching us the seasons of emotion from joy, to regret, patience, shame and pain. One begets the other from the birth announcement to the obituary. Three weeks had passed since someone I was close to as a boy had unexpectedly died. I had spoken at their funeral the following week and they were on my mind. 

 

At the funeral I shared a rambling story of us as boys in the mid 1980s involving him spending the night at my house and us hiking to Elsberry Mountain on a summer Saturday. I talked about how he had to find just the perfect walking stick, how long  that took and how he had to have one because I had one. He was competitive, considered a gifted child like me and in this period of our childhood he kind of looked up to me. Though he is gone, the happy and disappointing memories live on with me and others that knew him. I retraced those memories like a mountain trail which my feet had followed before. 

 

Our lives traveled down very different paths as was the case with so many of the people I knew growing up who became strangers. He and I had not spoken in ten years, but one of our last conversations went for hours through the early morning and past the sunrise. We caught up, we reminisced - we were two boys again who had spent so many years together. I had wanted to include him in one of my novels, I planned it and then thought better of it. It was not that he did not deserve to be in them, he did, but the time was wrong.  He remains a mountain behind my house hidden among the trees unseen at a distance, but breaking the landscape when viewed up close.

The view from the top of Sawnee Mountain looking to the north. Photo by me, March 2024.

The area known as the Indian Seats atop Sawnee Mountain. Photo by me, March 2024.

We took in the view of the mountain before us that summer Saturday so long ago. With sweat in our bangs we gripped our walking sticks unaware then how many mountains we had to climb, how high they would be or how low the valleys between them. I cannot say or understand what he saw that day or in the decades that followed, not long after, he chose one route and I another.

Me atop Sawnee Mountain. March 2024.

Thirteen years or a lifetime, I looked at the horizon with the same pair of eyes which had seen the hidden mountains from faraway and up close. His death hit me harder than I expected, there was a loss of balance at the edge of the rocks and that feeling has stayed with me. He should have seen the view.

 

The clouds moved in, the wind picked up and rain was coming by nightfall. I like storms, without them, nothing grows including people.

Without Distortion

 

In an old mill on a recent day.

I have been browsing the David Wojnarowicz papers at NYU the past few days. The photos contained in it are rather good and revealing too. From time to time I listen to his audio journals, Cross Country, which were recorded in 1989 while he was driving around the Southwest.

The 2020 documentary about Wojnarowicz, Fuck You Faggot Fucker, was excellent. Most of the film is in his own words and voice. I was fearful that the documentary would try to project the current political agendas onto his life and work and other than a couple of instances it did a good job of keeping it in context. I would have hated it if the modern revisionists would have tried to make him into something he was not.

I mention Wojnarowicz in my latest novel, Shadow's Gravity. He comes up in a conversation I have with the character Finn in 1999 along with Warhol and Keith Haring.

Not really related to any of this, but it was necessary for me to delete my Instagram account this weekend. There were numerous unsuccessful hacking attempts over the past several months on it. The attempts were annoying and I decided it was best to eliminate the security risk.

Gang of Four - What We All Want

Immediate Days

 

Main Street Louisville. Photo by me 1996.

In the immediate days that follow a book launch I am nervous. It takes patience and commitment to spend four years writing a book and more patience to wait for the judgement of readers to trickle in. The waiting wrecks my sleep and concentration. I have been lucky that it rained the past two days, it gave me an excuse to sit in my dark office and listen to Sigur Ros. I do not like summer in the South much anyway the older I get.

 

Releasing a book is like closing your eyes and stepping over a cliff. I put out four years of deeply personal work into the wilds of the world without knowing how it is received. I am unconcerned of what readers will think of me, I am more interested in what they think of the work. I am not a painter or photographer standing in a gallery at a show opening listening to comments and watching the crowd. I am also not a playwright getting a review in the morning's paper after opening night.

Unless, you are a writer then it is difficult to understand.  There is no instant punditry for new books with hours and days wasted analyzing every second on the television and internet by talking heads who produce nothing but unqualified opinions.

 

I peek at the sales data with one eye covered and know that people are buying and reading my book. Yet, it is too early for feedback and it is unknown what readers think as they turn the pages. Are they hating it? Understanding it or misunderstanding it?

 

Shadow's Gravity is the most complex and longest book I have written and I hope that readers will find it challenging to their perspective of the world.

Shadow's Gravity

 

Me during the various periods of the Aviary Hill series from 1979 to 2005.

This week was the release of my latest novel, Shadow's Gravity. It is the last book of the Aviary Hill series. The series is written about my family and my life between the years 1979 to 2005. 

The series began with Dweller On The Boundary in 2020 and ends this week with Shadow's Gravity. It has been forty years coming since a conversation with my father over pizza in December 1984. There have been many secrets, tragedies and a few triumphs in this story. Hopefully there has been some humor along the way and readers have met some interesting characters, from Uncle Ridley to Robin, David The Bishop, English Stan, Dylan, Everett, Piper, a boy from New Hope and the rest. I will miss writing about most of my characters, but I still have some of them in real life. 

Shadow's Gravity is the most complex, mature and most lengthy novel of the series as it takes place when I was twenty-two to thirty-two years old. It is set in the past, but readers should find that it remains relevant to today with some of the topics contained in it. 

I began writing this series in 2018. The release of Shadow's Gravity brings to an end a writing process that spanned the last six years with origination for the idea dating back to a conversation with my father over pizza in December 1984. This book brings to an end a forty year project. There is no plan or desire by me to write further in this series. I am free to move on to writing something else after four decades and what comes next will hopefully not take as long to complete.

There is plenty of material and stories that were edited out of the series, but with anything, it is impossible to tell everything. What was published in four books was the distillation of those years. It is unlikely that any of the stories cut during the writing process will see the light of day, though I believe some of them are some of the best writing I have done. Perhaps they will serve as inspiration for what I write next.

Shadow's Gravity is in part dedicated to the readers who took a chance and allowed me to tell them a story. I am grateful to them for their time and interest.  Thank you for reading.

Update On My Next Novel

 

That is me in October 2001 at a special place I have written about a few times, Patton's Run on the Nantahala River in North Carolina.

As of this morning's edit, it appears this novel should be finished and out by late June barring any major life interruptions or unforeseen developments. The word count currently sits at 112,000 words which would be by far my longest book. The cuts have already been deep and I want to bring this book in at around 100,000 to 105,000 words max.

This is the end, spanning from 1995 to 2005. It contains all of the answers that I can ever provide about everything I have written about my family and life. I hope readers find it engaging, fun, mysterious, surprising, not too depressing and different. I have been open how I struggled with a period of serious depression to write this. There are some seriously ugly, shocking and sad moments in it, but humor finds its way through. The last chapter, Silent Bridges, fits this lifelong project.

Farewell to Robin, Oliver, Elliot, all of the characters from all of the books, the past and may they rest in my new written time capsule. This book is for Everett, Louisville, Paulding County, Baby X and all of the other hidden children.

Thank you for reading.

 

Spring Roses and Bob Edwards

 

It has been such a wonderful spring for the roses this year at home. The blooms have been abundant and with the rain last Sunday the weight almost broke some bushes.
 

This orange one growing at one end of the back yard has been spectacular.

 

The New Dawn that we grew at my childhood home and I grow now has its first bloom of the season. It should be covered in the coming weeks.

The tall Louisville, Kentucky boy, Bob Edwards, with President Jimmy Carter.

I did not learn until yesterday that former NPR Morning Edition host Bob Edwards died in February. Bob was the original host of Morning Edition since its inception in 1979. He was a hero of mine in radio with his wonderful voice and style. I was a regular listener to his show in the 1990s and early 2000s. He was also a Louisville native and there was that special connection since I lived and worked in radio there too. Bob is mentioned in my next novel, Shadow's Gravity.

I no longer listen to NPR, haven't for several years, as the hosts are insufferable and the programming is insulting. The Atlanta affiliate WABE has completely lost me too with its narrow viewpoint and activist journalism that I can't relate.

Louisville which has three public radio stations under the Louisville Public Media umbrella, including one that is still dedicated to classical music (rare these days), is a better option.

Although Bob Edwards had the rare longevity of hosting the same radio program for twenty-five years, it was a shame that he was pushed out in 2004 and what NPR became.

At My Most Fragile

 

It is late winter, the middle of February, but here in Georgia that means early Spring. We come by our global warming here naturally. The trees are budding and I sit here in my Keith Haring tee shirt, needing a haircut and wearing a fuzzy cardigan still living like it is 1994. Blueberry yogurt is digesting in my stomach and the morning sun is out. The birds, no Robins, are singing what sounds like Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit. Needless to say, I'm feeling stupid and contagious.

Without further fanfare here is the promotional mock interview for my next novel due this summer.

 

---

 

At times I didn't think I could write this book.

 

Let's talk about secrets.

Okay. You first. (laughs)

You have written extensively about family and personal secrets. Some of them have been quite tragic including sexual abuse, rape and suicide. Some of these secrets are related to growing up gay in a small town and others were more common to American families from the 70s and 80s such as infidelity, domestic violence and divorce. Having revealed all of this, how do you feel about it and what's left to tell?

I said something a month ago, it was that I found writing to be an emotionally abusive occupation. I had to go back during the writing process and relive all of it to some degree by reading my old journals, watching videos, looking at photos and talking with people that knew me then. I've cried over some of it, I've been angry about other parts and Shadow's Gravity put me into a serious depression last year. At times I didn't think I could write this book, but then it clicked for me and out it came every morning.
It comes with a price besides my mental health and there are some people who look at me or think of me differently after knowing, but I can't be worried about it. I wanted the truth to be known.

And it's not like domestic abuse, infidelity and some of these topics were exclusive to the American family only when I was growing up. Humans are still humans and there remains no cure for those problems within families, nor are these problems strictly American.

If growing up gay today is easier, I can't say. It might be a different time and on some level easier, but being different will always be a challenge. It might be new times, but with that possibly comes a new set of problems. If anything, it may be more confusing and embarrassing for children with some of the attention placed on it in school these days. I know that if I was a fourth grader and the teacher was discussing gay life in class I would have turned bright red and tried to crawl into a crack in the floor. I don't know if that perspective is taken into consideration. I knew what I was, but I didn't want others to know because I was taught what I am was shameful by society. Children today may be different though and if the shame associated with it can be minimized then that's a good development. It might save lives. It's difficult to find trustworthy current statistics on suicide rates because of how the numbers are clustered together under the umbrella of LGBT.

There are plenty of secrets left. I've never teased some of what is in this book. Also, I've never told all of the abusive stories that happened in New Hope at home or at school. There is one story in this novel which is about a complete emotional breakdown of mine in my teens. I finally came clean with it in therapy in the 2000s. I also come clean with readers that have followed my books about what I felt for someone that I wasn't completely forthright about before.

 

When does Shadow's Gravity take place?

Originally it was planned to span nine years. It ended up covering 1995 to 2005. I was a busy person, much happened and it made for a more complete circle from 1979 to end in 2005. This book sprawls and covers lots of territory in terms of themes, people and locations. During this time, there were also crucial events that still define our world today such as the widespread adoption of the internet and cell phones, Y2K, September 11 and the heinous murder of Matthew Shepard. This novel is my most ambitious. I'm excited about it and I feel the same about it as I did when I was writing Dweller On The Boundary.

There was another unplanned change. When I was writing this novel something happened in real life to one of the people behind one of the main characters of all my books. This development resulted in a drastic change in the course of the book.

I deeply loved him and considered him my twin brother.

What happened and to whom?

I can't say what exactly happened, but it was David The Bishop. I was shocked at what occurred involving him and it made me want to go back and delve further into that relationship in an attempt to find clues and offer an explanation. I haven't had any contact with him since the 1990s, but I was hurt by what recently happened with him. It made my head spin because I thought so highly of him, I deeply loved him and considered him my twin brother. It tainted my memories of us. As with any of my relationships, I've never spilled everything, just what I viewed as the most important aspects. I had to go back and examine that relationship and I did write more about it. My heart breaks for him that it came to this.

 

Paulding County has been the epicenter of your books, how much Paulding County is in this book?

The story picks up with life at the factory in Atlanta when I worked at Turner Broadcasting. It surprised me when writing this book, how much Paulding County is in it. I look back on life in that period and I don’t automatically think about Paulding County, but I realized it was still an important part of my life and I was often there. I lived there twice. Even when I was living elsewhere it seemed like there was a chain tied around my feet connected to the bumper of a van with one of those murals painted on the side that was popular when I was a kid and it was dragging me back out there for events. Years after I had graduated I was at Paulding County High School three times, talk about being surrounded by ghosts. My mindset then was, one day I will say goodbye to Paulding County once and for all, but it seemed impossible. I suppose I'll never say goodbye to it now.

 

What's your relationship with Paulding County these days?

I was there this past January, but I don't have a relationship with it besides the cemeteries. I don't live that close to it anymore, about an hour and a half away and with traffic it's a miserable drive. I pass through there a couple of times a year and it's less recognizable each time. I'm proud to be born and raised there, but we aren't compatible. If I haven't made that case yet then I hope it is obvious in Shadow's Gravity after I disclose what happened at my last house there in 2002. In the last few years, writing these books I have walked down Main Street in Dallas, the cemetery in New Hope, the Silver Comet Trail a couple of times and have been a few other places. I feel like maybe I've conquered the past, but then being there still makes me a little jittery. Also, I doubt I'll ever be asked to come out and speak at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon or at the main branch of the library where I met David The Bishop at a chess tournament. My experiences there are probably not something they would want to promote.

 

My belief is that if you wanted me to say something nice about you then you should've treated me better when you had the chance.

 

Are you saying you've presented Paulding County in a negative light?

Not entirely and I haven't been unfair to it by any stretch. My belief is that if you wanted me to say something nice about you then you should've treated me better when you had the chance. I loved growing up there, but I have to be honest. The Paulding County educational system was great to me at the time with some failings, but the community as a whole wasn't too kind. It was a pretty place though. As an adult, I don't have much in common with it and that's a sign that one, or in this case, both have changed.

 

Does Decatur County, Tennessee figure into this book?

Yes, I was there frequently in the 2000s. I don't even know if my family knew how often I was there then. My mother didn't know. It was the beginning of something new with my father. There may never have been any of the books in this series without those times in Decatur County. My relationship with my father may not have been as cut and dried as readers may suspect. We were close for fourteen years, with twice weekly phone conversations, regular visits and we traveled together.

 

You mentioned ghosts earlier, are there ghost stories in this book?
Yes, there are three ghost stories and another type of supernatural experience in this novel. The one ghost that my character experienced terrified me in real life. You can think what you want about ghosts, but I believe they are a genuine phenomenon. Whatever they are I cannot say, maybe they are a form of hallucination or maybe they are something that is not a creation of our mind. I'm open to either possibility. Most people will not believe in them, but unless you've experienced it then I suggest keeping an open mind about them. I've experienced way too many shocks in my life, but the experience I had in this book was the most shocking experience I've ever had and I have no explanation for it.

 

Who is your favorite character in this book?

Everett. I loved getting to finally write about this wonderful person that was locked away in my past. He was a transplant like me to Louisville, but had lived there longer and had a family connection to the city. He was a significant part of my Louisville life. He came from New York, was private schooled and was very much from a WASPY background. He was a polished person in areas that I was more rough around the edges. He was someone that I would have considered unattainable, he was extremely beautiful, sophisticated and intelligent. He was the kind of person that I did not think I would ever know or become involved. He came into my life in an unusual way and I'll leave it at that.

 

What made Louisville so special for you that you mention it on a frequent basis?

It was a city that gave me everything I ever dreamed and experiences I didn't know that I wanted. No place has ever embraced me the way that city did in the nineties. It was beautiful, historic, interesting, charming at every step and it had zero connection to my past. It was everything Atlanta was not for me, a chance to live a fresh new life. It was also fun trying to figure out what the mystery odor was that wafted around the city on certain mornings.

 

It feels like I'm losing them all over again and that hurts.

 

Since this is the end of the series, readers will expect resolution to the storylines that have been featured in your books. Is that going to happen?

Yes. It will not be neat and tidy though and requires an epilogue which is something I've not included before. I will resolve everything from my grandmother, to the search for Oliver, coming out to family, my relationship with Dylan, David The Bishop, Elliot, other people and places too like Aviary Hill.

Now this is coming to end, I am both happy and sad that this is the last book in the Aviary Hill series. I am happy to finally finish what I set out to do since I was a child and can move on to new writing territory. I am sad because I fell in love with some of these characters and I am unhappy about letting them go. I've spent years with them and trying my best to convey how meaningful to me these people were. It feels like I'm losing them all over again and that hurts.

No mention of Robin.

I'll be honest and say that there hasn't been a resolution with him, I don't believe it will ever be possible and that's for the best. He's not a major character in this novel as I never communicated with him during this period, though his presence and influences are heavily there as there was no way to deny the lasting impacts he had on me. Readers might think the sound of the crickets story and its effect on me in Uncivil X was fiction, but that was one example of the very real influence he had on me. He was a major figure in my young life and you don't ever shake someone like that.

 

Any plans to write another book about your family or your life?

No. I feel like I'm still living in the period that follows Shadow's Gravity and I want to keep my privacy. I might find some inspiration from parts of it, but I would not wish to do more than that. My day to day life isn't all that interesting anyway. Writing, hiking, gardening, photography, travel, work around the house and loafing in antique shops or wherever is what my life is these days. People on my Facebook can tell you that it's terribly lame like watching old music videos on YouTube or bad photos of stuff I see alongside the road or where I walk. I collect postcards and maybe I should start sharing that hobby on Facebook. I'm not all that interested in social media. I'm still a shy person no matter how much I have written about the past parts of my life. I won't say never, I learned that lesson a long time ago, but it is very, very, unlikely that I would ever do it. I still maintain a journal, but that's for my eyes only.

All that remains of the past that I want to publish is my poetry book from the 1990s and much of that is subject matter about family and growing up. I'd like to do that this year, but I don't know if it's the right time. It's me at my most fragile. 

 

A Chris Jr. running around out there? Hmm.

 

You shared a few details about the possibility of you having a child. Do you?

A Chris Jr. running around out there? Hmm. Well, it would spoil a few things to answer that here. I answer that in Shadow's Gravity and the circumstances about that very possibility. I'm a good secret keeper, I've proven that. I'm not one to share everything about my current life on social media and I have serious concerns about the detrimental effects of what social media does to children's mental health.

 

What's one weird story in this novel?

There would have to be several or it wouldn't be my life, but I'll mention hanging out late one night at Charlie Dick's house in Nashville. Okay maybe two, how I was dragged onto the film set of Remember The Titans, which I've still not seen. I did leave out the story of  my being at 99X and how it involved a thrift store album of my favorite, Barry Manilow.

 

There are a lot of music references in your books, from names of songs that were pivotal to the stories or playing in the background of scenes. It's obvious music is important to you, so what are some of the bands or songs mentioned in this book?

 

There are several music references in this book, but hopefully fewer as I was aware of it and trying to get away from that, but since I was in radio for much of this book it was kind of unavoidable. Also, it's kind of an interactive experience for a reader. I enjoy exposing people to music that they may not have heard and may enjoy if they look it up when they read a book of mine. Did people go listen to Robbie Dupree's Steal Away after reading about it in Dweller On The Boundary? I don't know, but they should. It was one of those songs bouncing around in my little brain in the evenings when I was out running around with Robin in the twilight. Or maybe readers my age were reminded just how great the Cure's Lullaby was by having it playing while Tavin and I fumbled around in my car in a church parking lot. People could go study the lyrics to songs by The Police and see the similarities to my life.
As for Shadow's Gravity, Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark album is part of a scene with Everett in Louisville. Her songs Free Man in Paris, People's Parties and The Same Situation from that time with him capture the mood. Another band mentioned would be Pansy Division, a San Francisco gay punk band, who I got into in the mid 90s when I was going through this period of finally being comfortable in my skin for the first time ever. By the way, the guy on the album cover is from Georgia and was the last lover of William S. Burroughs and was involved with Allen Ginsberg too.

 

What is one random object like a toy that you still have from your childhood?

This toy gun. It shot those red paper caps. I used to play with it with Robin. I may have mentioned it in Dweller On The Boundary. I lost it for a time, but as a teenager I found it sticking out of the mud one day walking around the front yard.

What is something random from your childhood that you have not written about?

I loved train sets. My first train set was the Golden Eagle. There was always something with birds, wasn't there? I had a few train sets and would buy extra cars and buildings for my town at the Kessler's at Cobb Center. That store had one of the best toy departments except for the Lionel Playworld on Windy Hill Road.

 

Since I can't ever say who he was or share a photo, that is the closest I can come.

Any final secrets you care to share?

Okay, why not? When Robin left me a music video came out that June and it was like this gift to me. It was Bonnie Tyler's mega hit, Total Eclipse of the Heart, and one of the best videos ever made at the height of the MTV era. The video is set at a boy's school. One of the boys looked to my ten year old eyes like Robin. I fantasized that it was him in the video and I never moved when it came on television. I was pitifully heartbroken. He appears at the very end of the video and runs up to the group of boys already assembled. Since I can't ever say who he was or share a photo, that is the closest I can come to ever sharing what he looked like. I loved that video and took comfort in it. You can cross your heart on that. This video was also released near the time my gifted teacher wanted to send me away to private school and it shaped my idea of what it would've been like. It might be the most homoerotic video ever made too.

What is next after all of this?

I have piles of research on a Georgia murder from the 1970s that I may use for a book. I recently went by one of the locations for it and some time ago I hiked out to where the bodies were dumped. It was a spooky place. I have other ideas in various stages of development too. I am tempted to write something that is pure fiction and stretch myself. Part of me wants to write a book with 80s Atlanta punks as the main characters. People probably don't realize that there were punk clubs like 688 or the Metroplex in the eighties because that facet of Atlanta never seems to be talked about. I'm not certain what comes next, but whatever story is next it will be set in the American South, one of the most complicated and beautiful places on the planet. It has bothered me for most of my life how people get the South wrong, even people born here. There's a lot of lazy propaganda produced in the news and entertainment industry about what the imperfect South is from attitudes to culture. Without being an apologist for the South and the history before I was born, I want to try and change some of the misconceptions about what the South is.

 

Last question. What is the biggest challenge for indie writers?

Finding a book I wrote on the shelves of a Barnes & Noble bookstore was an incredible feeling. November 2020.

A lack of a promotional budget and a big publisher behind you when it comes to publicity. I'm grateful for the audience I have who took a chance on me, but of course I'd love to sell more books. Every writer wants to be read. I don't care anything about being famous or culturally important, but I do want to be read more widely and not be a niche writer. I willingly chose to be an indie knowing the challenges that come with it so I'm not complaining, but I'm mentioning it as a challenge to the business side of writing. I try not to promote myself all that much because there is something unseemly about that. Much of my promotion comes via word of mouth on social media and I'm dependent on ratings and reviews from readers on services like Amazon to help coax the the algorithms into favoring me. I wish more people that read my books would take the two minutes to rate or review me there with their genuine feedback. I have far more readers than ratings and reviews on my books and more feedback would definitely help me.

 

Thank you for reading. 

 

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.