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 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.

The Silent And The Quiet

 

Late spring encroaches on the banks of the Yellow River in Georgia. Photo by me, April 2023.

On a recent walk in the woods it was surprisingly quiet. It was so quiet that it was noticeable like a change in the atmosphere from dry to humid. It is not often that you can find woods that are quiet anymore. Most woods around the northern half of Georgia outside of places deep in the mountains are not far enough away from some form of civilization like a road, a subdivision or other people that you can enjoy the natural sounds of the environment. I grew up in a quiet place, enjoyed it and prefer it today.

Where I walked was in the woods of Yellow River Park near Stone Mountain. I know that it was only quiet on the trails because it was a Monday in late April and it was late afternoon. Another day and another time and it likely would not have been so peaceful. This was a fortunate experience unlikely to be repeated unless maybe I returned to walk in the rain.

 

It was down this stretch of path when I noticed how quiet it was. Photo by me, April 2023.

It is my impression that society and modern life does not value quiet and especially silence. Lives are filled with noisy traffic, chirping car alarms, slamming car doors, leaf blowers, cell phone notifications, loud talking people, music blasting and background television wanting to sell you something. So much space and tolerance is made in life for noise that little is left for quiet.

It is amazing how much can be learned about people because they do not care to remember that voices have a volume control and that we have feet to bring two people closer in conversation instead of shouting from a distance. I find myself judging people's manners by how loud they speak in public and not always by what they say. It is not always about what is said, but how it is said. I would prefer to know less about strangers, but they do not care so shout it to the world they think – or in fact they do not think.

 

I passed through a thicket of blooming mountain laurel and it was a surprise. Photo by me, April 2023.

Photo by me, April 2023.

Photo by me, April 2023.

 

The same goes for music. I wait for the moment that I hear a car loudly playing something by Bach, Chopin, Mahler or Mozart or anything remotely classical out the car windows as it drives by. Something tells me I will be waiting for the rest of life and never hear that. I will concede that if I heard that often enough too that I might say, “damn those Bach lovers and their incessant need to pollute the world with that noise.”

I kind of doubt I would have that reaction, but I would like to be tested.

 

The twists and turns through the woods. Photo by me, April 2023.

Photo by me, April 2023.

Photo by me, April 2023.

The frequency in which people slam car doors now is something that truly surprises me. The slammed car door is like an act of violence to my ears. I was raised to never slam a car door and learned that I was going to be scolded if I did. Do parents scold children these days? I suspect they do not. Children and adults are zombies to cell phone screens and cannot seem to walk without one in their hand, clutching them like security blankets.

Modern life has been degraded in so many aspects that people either do not notice or care like the trash out the window and into the ditch. Loud people and devices and their behaviors are polluters dragging down the quality of life for everybody else.

 

Photo by me, April 2023.

Photo by me, April 2023.

Photo by me, April 2023.

Some people are afraid of silence and it must be because it is so unfamiliar to them. People have a tendency to feel uncomfortable in the presence of the different, the other and often that other is quiet. Or maybe and this is a more scary proposition; they are afraid to be alone with the thoughts inside their own head. A couple of years ago, I said to someone when I was writing some of the stories in Terminal Wake that the book was as much about silence as it was anything else.

 

I emerged from the tree canopy into a field. Photo by me, April 2023.

As for someone like me, that is highly sensitive to sound, I notice and appreciate when sound is absent in public. I do not expect the world to accommodate me, but maybe they could consider being quiet and modest for themselves sometimes.

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.

Untied

At my grandparent's kitchen table looking at photos in the 1980s.

It is just after five in the morning as I sit with my coffee on the patio in the rear of my house. I am sitting on the creaky wooden bench I got from my mother's house after she died. I am enjoying that special silence that comes this early or late depending on the hours you keep. My mind is out there in the stars of the western sky and I ask them what I did wrong. My tendency is to always blame myself when something is wrong, even though I did nothing to cause these circumstances just like I had no role in putting those stars in the sky.

I did not outgrow my family. I spent much of my life around family until I was thirty-one years old. It was when my mother died when I was thirty-one that I realized how little affection for me there was on my mother's side of the family. I thought that all those years together, having coffee, talking around the table, the reunions, frequent family gatherings meant something, but I over estimated my position. It was my mother that everyone had the affection for and I was tagging along at her request, but I also enjoyed those times around family nonetheless.

In the shadow of my mother 1995.

I was tolerated, not accepted. It was in the 2010s when I was invited to a Thanksgiving dinner at an aunt's house that I realized I was wrong about what my family thought about my life. Though I had a long term partner my aunt explicitly made it clear that I was the only one invited and that he was not. I was not seen as the boy that they knew as a child and gave nicknames, I was an aberrant identity to them now. So much so that this aunt said the world was going to end soon because I finally had the right to marry and be treated equally. These were the people I looked the most like and shared a blood line, but somehow I was inferior.

I went to two of these Thanksgiving dinners alone so that I could see my family. I subjugated my pride and self respect just to see them. None of them were asked to check their self worth at the door, except me. I was glad to see my family for a steep price. I held my quiet indignity tight so that I could hear their voices and see their faces again.

Family are people that know us in ways that others cannot. They knew us when we were unguarded children getting grass stains in hand-me-down jeans or what we were like before we succumbed to roles of adulthood later in life. They remember when you were tired of the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at summer lunches. They may remember our differences, but they are supposed to be better at overlooking and forgiving them. They are family and they are what ties us back to our beginnings like eternal shoestrings and to our family history.

 

Those shoestrings have come untied for me and them.

Silence has settled in for the past eleven years between my mother's side of the family and me. There was no fight, no disagreement, nothing – it was a disconnect as if I no longer existed. I have not heard from them, received a phone call or Christmas card. I hear things about them, sometimes, but that is all. I know some of them have read my books and none of them reached out to me to discuss any of the revelations in them, though some of them knew part of what happened at the time. I went as far as protecting some of them and their feelings by not writing about them or leaving out details that might hurt them. I tried to be as considerate as I could and write as much truth as possible; that is not an easy line to walk when the truth is painful.

The silence nags at me. I would reach out to them, but I expect to be ignored or worse rejected. The stars are bright white dots in the sky and I am red Mars in the corner. I search for reasons and find none. I am an easy person to find on the internet, there is this website with my email that I have had since the beginning of Gmail, I am on Facebook and I have had the same phone number for well over a decade. 

 

Me in my home office in 2023.

I believe my mother would be disappointed at how I have been treated by her/our family. I have their photos on my walls and I can assume they have none of me on their walls. That name I share meant as much to me as the name that I wear. That name is impossible to hide and is obvious as looking at me.

100 Years

 

Warning New Hope Next Left. Seen recently in a cotton mill turned antique store in Monroe, Georgia.

Once a year I type a name into a database and check the status of a person. It is not Facebook or another social media website, it is a database of criminal records. I have to know the status of the person that the character of Rowe from Dweller On The Boundary and Terminal Wake is based. For my own peace of mind I want to know if he is incarcerated or not. Last week was my most recent search.

 

I have not encountered this person in many years, but there is no safety valve to prevent that from changing. Fate has seen before that we collided and it is possible it could happen again. Consider me dramatic or paranoid if you wish, but you really do not understand how dangerous this person remains.

 

Curiosity got the better of me when I was writing Dweller On The Boundary and I found a recent photo of him. He looked as dangerous and deadly as he always had. His eyes were very much alive in the photo and all that fear in me of him resurfaced. I hoped his eyes would be dead and that the life in them had been beaten out, but no. He could kill me as easily today and he tried long ago.

 

I have my suspicions on what made this person into Rowe based on second hand knowledge and rumor. He was not born a criminal or evil, I believe few people are. I know for certain through my own observations of him as a child that he had it difficult in his home life and that likely contributed to what he became. It generates no sympathy in me for him or those other two boys and it does not move me to forgiveness. Some acts are too heinous to be forgiven and I doubt he cares one way or another.

 

Rowe is currently out of prison and has been for five years. Is he a changed person? No, I would think that he is not and it will be a matter of time before he is convicted again for another crime. He is the repeat offender of repeat offenders. Of the fifteen convictions that are listed in his criminal record, fourteen were for crimes in Paulding County. His most recent conviction was in another county in northwest Georgia.

 

From those fifteen convictions he has tallied a total number of years sentenced to a perfect one hundred years. One hundred years and fifteen convictions and he walks free in society. One hundred years on worthless paper and in the hollow words of judges. His convictions are for crimes that include violence, theft, burglary, drugs and DUI dating back to 1996. How many other crimes has he committed that he never was arrested and prosecuted? What crimes did he commit as a minor that are sealed away and all he earned was time spent in a youth detention center? I could answer some of that.

 

In the records it lists his last physical description as six feet five inches high and weighing two hundred pounds. I stand six feet one and weigh one hundred and fifty pounds by contrast. I am no match for him the same as then.

 

Rowe lives in north Georgia and the other people live in Paulding County. I have been asked many times who Rowe is and who were the other two boys. I am not going to say as it changes nothing. You can read my books and think what you wish, but you did not walk in my white Reeboks or go to Blackout Log. 

 

I would ask, which of us is the free man?