No matter how bad it gets…

grayscale photo of explosion on the beach

And it has gotten extremely bad lately…

I guess there is some comfort to be found in knowing…

That it could always get worse.

Yeah…

Not sure if I have the imaginative capacity, or fortitude, to imagine how.

Hope I don’t.

But, still, here we are, despite it all, moving forward…

Even if it’s just at the most timid and extremely infinitesimal pace.

Because we must.

And we shall.

So yeah, in the midst of all this, all this being our latest global nightmare of ___________ [fill in the blank]*, I finally managed to do something I have been wanting to do pretty much since the onset of the past global nightmare of ___________ [fill in the blank].

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A New Look

Well, I guess in this hyperfast doom scrolling timeline of a world we now live in, 2020 as a publishing date is rather old…

WE ALL DIE IN THE END by Elizabeth Merry – A Review

Merry’s is some of the best writing I’ve read in a while. Like Faulkner, she creates a fictional world unto its own, Faulkner’s set as a struggling Mississippi town, Merry’s as a struggling seaside town in Ireland…

In Appreciation of a Photograph

Except for THE GOOD KILL, of which I contracted out to Extended Imagery, for better or worse, you decide, I’ve created all my book covers, including the one for my latest novella RAINY SEASON.

It’s a fun process creating book covers, one that allows me to escape the writing process tedium for a while and become creative through other mediums. I like to create the cover early on in the story development process so I can refer to it for inspiration similar to the way I refer to the logline.

The covers I created are mostly designed around photographs I took, except for HOW NOT TO DIE, which you’ll see if you look closely, is designed around a photograph of me in a hospital bed flashing my middle finger in defiance as I’m being treated for heart failure, which was the result of a freak side effect of the chemo drug I was taking at the time (I was speedily switched to a different drug which has yet to cause my heart to fail, fingers crossed), and except for HERCULES GONE MAD, which is designed from a drawing of mine.

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Starbucks and Mocha

The New York Times’ recent piece Melville’s Whale Was a Warning We Failed to Heed is actually a quite serious look at human nature, racism, the environment… but here is a fun selection from it that belies its erudition: Melville had read Jeremiah Reynolds’s violent account of a sperm whale “white as wool,” named — … Read more

THE GOOD KILL – A Review by Meg Orton

In conclusion this is a novel that took me completely by surprise in the best way possible. Brindley has an impeccable grasp of the English language, as well as an extraordinary gift for writing a damn fine tale of intrigue, epic action, a little mystery, one hell of a conspiracy, and what I really hope is a fantastic introduction to a character that I adore for so many reasons, whom I hope to meet again and whose place in literature is sorely needed at present…