Dead Leaves 2024

 

October 2024.

This is my favorite season, Autumn, when the leaves crunch under foot and the scent of dead leaves hangs in the woods. I love that scent more than anything and would love to find an indoor air freshener that recreates it. My office at home could smell like coffee, books and dead leaves and I would doze off before completing another sentence. If there was a fragrance called Dead Leaves I would mist it all over myself until I was delirious and drunk on it.

Some of the scenery I have seen this week.

Photo by me, October 2024.

Photo by me, October 2024.

Photo by me, October 2024.

Photo by me, October 2024.

The water rose four feet covering everything in silt during Hurricane Helene. Photo by me, October 2024.

I noticed this week during a couple of walks in parks near where I live that we are beginning to see hints of color in this part of Georgia at around a thousand feet of elevation. It is typically not peak season here until early November. 

 

Every week, I make miles on the trails somewhere and this was likely the end of shorts season as the second walk of the week was a tad cool at sixty-five degrees with windy conditions. Time now for the sweat pants, long socks and fleece. There have been two mornings with lows in the thirties and there was a frost. The chilly weather is two weeks early and it could not come soon enough as I was ready for the warm weather to end.

Today I finished putting out the pansies for the cold season flowers. I planted much more this year and it took two days to get them planted. Winter here can be rather rainy and gray, which I like, but it is nice to have some color around too.

 

The Summer of 2024

We should enjoy summer, flower by flower, as if it were to be the last one we will see.  - Andre Gide

 

The water shot from the nozzle of the hose on the August evening and I was a kid with a water cannon. The sunlight was blazing hot coming around the corner of the house between the sweetgum tree and the Japanese maple. I was sure it was going to make a weird sunburn shape on my bare leg that resembled Salvador Dali's melted pocket watches in his 1930s painting The Persistence of Memory. I jitterbugged to keep the mosquitos from dining on my ankles, but gave up when an evening stroller passed. The neighbors or strangers on my street can be a judgemental lot. Itchy red welts were as guaranteed as anything that Sears had sold under the Craftsman brand.

 

I watered hydrangeas, gardenias, nelly holly, zinnias, mums, daisies, roses, lilies, lavender, peonies, a camellia, pampas grass, begonias, some trees and  the lawn. If it needed water, and most everything did, then I doused it.

This was August being August when summer is supposed to be winding down, but sometimes flares up into a hot spell. These late summer heatwaves are as hollow as the wolf huffing and puffing outside the door. Summer can bully, but it always succumbs to autumn's triumph. The sunsets are sooner and the sunrises later as the sun has less time for its mischief. Hopefully by late October the frost will come to deliver the knock out punch.

The wayward downpours of July.

I loved and hated the summer of 2024. July was the worst and it always is. The sun was too strong and even the wind went on vacation that month. The rain spigot was shut off in June and remained so until the last two weeks of July. I watched the rain get lost time after time as it approached our side of the hill. It charged at us head on in a tease to only turn and climb another hill. The odds were not in our favor. Two weeks of storms in late July became no rain in August and the first half of September. The ground ached.

July 14th was the hottest day of the summer. The misery climaxed at 101 degrees.

The beginning and the ending of summer are the best parts with the rewards of new beginnings from the sprouts and the conclusions concentrated in the blooms. I cannot tell if I am writing about the life cycle of a season or of humans - they are so similar after all.

 

There were failures in the garden this year. What is a garden without some brown spotted leaves, bugs gnawing and the blooms that never were? The gladiolas grew, stalled and died. The poppies never sprouted. Two beds of wildflowers were eaten by wildlife. The hydrangeas bloomed early then lost their will to bloom again and instead wilted through the heat.

The hummingbirds have migrated as of last week, the wild rabbit that has lived here since spring has hopped onward, the deer are foraging more in the nearby woods and the hours of light are much shorter. Summer has ended and the drought lingers. It is time to plant bulbs for next spring, the clock of the garden never stops.

These were some of the successes grown here after the spring show of tulips and irises.

 

Summer goes with a wave, a turn on its heel and the understanding that it will reincarnate itself next year.

The Wind Down of Summer

 

Photo by me, August 2024.

Sometimes you have to stop when out for a walk and enjoy the view. That was what I did this past Sunday while on a six mile walk as the sweat soaked through my clothes and dripped from my hair. The sun was setting behind the clouds and hills and turning the landscape golden. It was late enough that no one else was around as the breeze cooled me off on an August evening.

It was a slow and gentle moment and there have been few of those this summer. I have spent too much time on the road going from here to there and back again. I love the road, but I love it less than I once did. Charles Kuralt in a Winnebago I am not. The hotel coffee, miles of traffic and the dependency on internet reviews of restaurants to find good food that often turn out to be anything but good wears me down after an extended period of it. I swear some people have questionable taste or low expectations when it comes to what is a decent meal. Years ago on a trip I learned to never eat Thai food in Amarillo and I was recently reminded again in another small city to stay away from Thai food in places where there is not a sizable Thai population.

Homeward bound. Photo by me July 2024.

The road is not done with me this year, I will be back on it soon enough.  I have considered writing a book that is set on the road as I entertain ideas for the next novel. The romance of the road is something I have seem to have lost between the rest areas and the mileposts. Or it could be that I do not enjoy summer travel all that much anymore.

A butterfly bush that I planted this year blooms. Photo by me, August 2024.

 

I am ready for summer to be over, my tan to fade, to put the shorts away for a few months and for the humidity to cease making the outdoors into a sauna. The flowers in my garden have been wonderful this year, but I am ready to do some work in them that requires cooler weather. Outdoor work around here never stops, there is always something to plant, trim, mulch or redesign. I am as an attentive gardener here as I was growing up at my childhood home in the country. I will miss the adorable hummingbirds that have been here all summer enjoying the lavender, zinnias, roses and other plants.

Terrible news out of New York as the legendary WCBS 880 is being flipped to sports talk. As if the world needs another place for mostly men to call in and bloviate about sports and worship overpaid sports stars. Of all my work in broadcasting I was never more proud of the work I did in the early 2000s on-air at WCBS 880. It was reaching the pinnacle in the industry to have been associated with that station. I thought the writing may have been on the wall for WCBS when recently there was significant breaking news and I tuned in. The station made no mention of the news for some time and in the past they would have been all over it and the anchoring sounded small market and not ready for the big leagues.

Photo by me, August 2024.

A couple of weeks ago I stopped in a "vintage" shop in Athens. It was the kind the of place where the merchandise was twice as old as the staff and the majority of the customers. I have been looking for a barn jacket from the nineties like I wore back then. I found several in this shop in okay, but not great, shape and at outrageous prices. They were charging three times the going price and this was a place where broke college students were the primary customers. Maybe college students are not broke these days or the ones who go to UGA aren't? If only I had kept the barn jacket I had as it would still fit today. I did think the above photo of the guy in a mask with a chain was curious and unexpected, but then again it was Athens so it was not all that weird.

Additional reading worth considering: How The Gay-Rights Movement Lost Its Way in The Atlantic.

Pylon - Danger

The Names

 

I

've been listening to this band called The Names and their 1982 album, Swimming, the past couple of days. Since modern music is terrible, I find that there is plenty of good music from the past out there for me to discover. 

 

I found the band through a Christmas compilation disc called Ghosts of Christmas Past released by the Les Disques du Crepuscule label. I was looking for music by Winston Tong, who is also on that album and does a humorous version of The Twelve Days of Christmas.

 

I was nine when Swimming came out and there was no commercial Atlanta station who would have been playing this album then. I suppose it was possible that the Georgia State University station, WRAS, might have played them since that was the year the station became known as Album 88 or The Georgia Tech station, WREK, could have played them. 

 

At that age in 1982 I was listening to WZGC Z-93. The music I would have heard that was in any way similar would have been Human League's Dont You Want Me or anything by The Police.

Wildcat

 

Last night I was watching Wildcat, an Ethan Hawke directed movie about Southern Gothic writer and Georgia native Flannery O'Connor, and I realized I knew exactly where it was filmed. In this scene above the actor playing Flannery is walking through my old neighborhood in Old Louisville. It is the exact same spot from Shadow's Gravity where Everett and I walk after the bakery to the fountain. I was glad to see that the movie was filmed in Louisville as it is not a place often used in films unlike Georgia or California.

Anyway, it was a good movie. I was completely unaware that Ethan had lived in Atlanta with his mother as a young boy for a short time. He is apparently a big fan of Flannery O'Connor.

 

My favorite quote from Flannery might be, "The truth does not change according to your ability to stomach it."

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

All Things 90s

Ding, ding, ding!  

 

"There isn’t really subversive youth culture anymore, merely well-rehearsed identities which are all derivative of some moment between 1950 and 2000."
From The Critic, When Things Could Only Get Better.

 

I have a copy of this book and I have read some of it. As with anything, some of it I agree with  and other parts I do not. I remember in the 90s there was much nostalgia for the 1970s and today it is the 1990s.

The Political Whiners

 

This icky feeling comes over me whenever I log into Facebook for so many reasons. The primary source bothering me now is politics - I hate the stupid filtered selfies too, the constant updates by people acting as if they are celebrities on a reality show also, but the political ranting is the worst nuisance at the moment. 

 

People should keep their political opinions off the service. Were they not taught that politics and religion should not be mentioned in polite company? 

 

A friend from way back, said a few years ago that she used to love to discuss politics with me in the 1990s. I eschew such now, but I enjoyed the conversations then and we did not agree on everything. In the 90s it was possible to have a political conversation and disagree, but not now. People have wrapped their entire being into one of two teams, either red or blue and cannot be civil or believe they know everything or believe in stupid conspiracy theories. I blame social media, identity politics, television, print and internet media and the lousy politicians for this change.

 

It is not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing or being a Republican or Democrat or a Whatever-the-fuck, it is just inappropriate to spew your political rants on Facebook. Unfortunately, it is an election year and people have nothing better to post between the beach selfies and memes. It makes me wish I could find a way to permanently leave that service behind.

What has been on my mind is how it felt for Soviets prior to the collapse in 1991 when nothing made sense for them and whether some saw it coming or not. It makes me think of those Adam Curtis documentaries for the BBC, especially TraumaZone which is about the Soviet Union  and Can't Get You Out of My Head which is more about the U.S. and Europe. The documentaries of Curtis are a bit of an acquired taste I admit and they do require the viewer to give them a chance so I doubt the Facebook loudmouths have the patience for them.

 

The United States is deeply troubled, has been for several years, and I wonder where it leads. I do not recognize this country after decades of social and political upheaval. It is not the country I was born, raised and enjoyed much of my life. What a somber Fourth of July.

View from a Hill - The Chameleons 

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.

Sebastian

 

Sebastian looks like an interesting film (trailer) that comes out this August. 

 

The film is about a gay writer working on his debut novel about prostitution. The main character takes his research seriously. I doubt there will be much focus spent on the toils of being a writer and the isolation it requires and more screen time will be dedicated to the prostitution angle. Writing is after all not a sexy occupation. 

 

The lead actor, Ruaridh Mollica, is quite handsome. I look forward to seeing it and him.

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.

Steve Albini Dies

Steve Albini in the documentary Breadcrumb Trail.

 

Sometimes it feels like the 90s were yesterday, but then someone who had a major influence on that decade dies and I am reminded that the 1990s were a long time ago.

 

It was surprising to learn of Chicago based producer/engineer Steve Albini's death last week at age sixty-one. 

 

I most associate him with his work with Nirvana on In Utero and Fugazi. He was also known for his odd engineering choices made on Slint's Tweez album. Slint is probably the most well known rock band to have come from Louisville. Spiderland produced by Brian Paulson was considered their best album.

 

What I admired most about Albini was the indie ethos that he stayed true to in his work. He achieved much success in the 90s and it would have been easy for him become a sellout. 

 

Culturally the country is in a very different and worse place decades later with no Nirvanas and Albinis around.

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.

 

Movies, Thoughts and Walks in May

 

A photo from a walk near home this past Monday. The landscapes are getting the late spring green as summer settles into place. Though I enjoy gardening and being out in nature in the warmer months, summer's heat and humidity is not as much fun as when I was a child.

I reread Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic from 1970 this week. It is relevant again in modern life among the poseurs of society.

Recent movies I watched:

The old mansion in Silent Night, Bloody Night

 

Silent Night, Bloody Night - I probably saw this on television in the seventies when old movies regularly played on the Atlanta independent stations. The movie is from 1972 and it captures how I remember the seventies as dark, rural and quiet. The 70s were not all about disco despite what people may think. I enjoyed the movie for what it was.

Westler -This is a 1985 West German gay movie about two lovers divided by the Berlin Wall. I'm obsessed with the GDR and Berlin so this movie appealed to me for it's footage shot on both sides of the wall. The plot and acting weren't the best, but it had enough appeal for me. The East German film, Coming Out, released in 1989 is a more complete and interesting film.

 

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.

April Movies and Music

 

As an Erik Satie fan I was thrilled to learn about this album last week on BBC Radio 3. I have had it on repeat ever since. My introduction to Satie was through film. I heard his music the first time as a small boy when I saw the movie Being There with Peter Sellers and Shirley MacLaine. It would not be until I was an adult that I find out who composed the music that I could not forget.

Movies & documentaries that I have watched in the last month:

Drifter (set in Berlin and loved it)

Downtown 81 (that period of New York fascinates me. Dreamy and gritty.)

The Killing Of A Sacred Deer (there isn't a Yorgos Lanthimos film that I haven't liked)

Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak (loved Where The Wild Things Are as a child and Sendak does not disappoint as a documentary subject.)

The Man Who Skied Down Everest (stunning visuals in this documentary. I'll never be convinced that the seventies weren't the best decade of film.)

February Gray Days

 

Atlanta. Photo by me, February 2024

After the morning writing sessions this last weekend, I went down to the city to pick up another chandelier for the house, got new glasses from Warby Parker, ventured  into Athens, and squeezed in some miles in the woods.

 

Marietta. Photo by me, February 2024.

And I made it over to the Marietta Square, which was part research for the next novel. A bus almost hit me in a crosswalk on the square. I gave the driver a stare and the finger for which she honked at me as if she was in the somehow in the right. If there is a county that is hell then it is Cobb County, Georgia. 

Gin Blossoms, Hey Jealousy.

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.