It was never about getting high, if that’s what you are thinking. Better ways to get high are on every street corner in the good old U.S. of A. It was about getting lost. About forgetting. It was about going numb. Going numb to the whole friggin world. Opiates will do that...make you numb. They take you away and you don’t even know your gone. It’s not about getting high. It’s about dying. Beautiful dying.

It has been a busy year! My pitiful efforts to write in this blog with regularity was hampered by life and time spent on the back porch letting the imagination soar.

A new book is scheduled for August 31, "Whosoever Believes". I enjoyed writing it and have included an excerpt below. But I began this post with an excerpt from what has become my favorite book, "Beautiful Dying." I spent the weekend updating the book that was originally released last year. There were, of course, the typographical errors I overlooked on the first go around. They were easier to correct than to notice. As I read Beautiful for the first time in some while it dawned on me that this is a love story. I don't think when I first penned this short I had intended it to fall into a genre I have never written in. Crafting a love story requires emotions I long ago buried. But somehow in Beautiful Dying a love story was born. Jacko, the main character meets an unnamed woman in a pub one Saturday night. The meeting takes place on the eve of his planned suicide day.

Originally I intended the story to be about addictions and the struggles, including suicide, the addict will face if they choose to stay high. I see that now as a subplot. The breath of Beautiful Dying is about love. I hope you will consider getting your copy this month.

Now, from my newest novel, "Whosoever Believes"

If a poet were to scribble a sonnet to this Saturday night in Patriot, Texas, he or she would likely chronicle the midnight skies littered with millions of stars, spewing poetic words of twinkling diamonds juxtaposed with the lonesome melancholy of the deserted streets. An artist, witnessing the same scene would crosshatch the background with water colors of dark blues and blacks swirled together adding an endless depth to the speckling of the bright white stars. Keen on detail, the talented artisan would depict the late-night desolation of Patriot township by adding to the landscape a solitary pickup truck parked aside the curb a hundred yards southeast of Patriot Baptist Church.
A writer would caution you that inside the lonely pickup truck sits a young man named Frank Lynn Dawson, nineteen years old and confused. The radio-CD player delivers the sounds of Rascal Flats singing What Hurts the Most, while the truck’s heater delivers only chilly air. Our lone occupant had meant to fix the heater before winter came but had never gotten around to it. It didn’t matter, he wouldn’t need it after tomorrow. The late-night loner knows no matter how things turn out tomorrow he would be someplace warmer.