About the Author

Writing for me is a necessity. Pure and simple. It’s a way to make sense of the non-sensical — a means of cataloging memories into characters whose lives are a hybrid of imagination, experience, and exploration. It’s often times a very lonely and isolating task, while at the same time liberating in that it opens my thinking to broader interpretations that I hope will cohesively make up a good story.

I have been writing since I was in high school. Poems, songs, professional communications. The dull stuff like memos, press releases, media pitches, etc. After 50 years, I can’t remember when I was not writing, either through words or the creative process of idea formulation. All of that spawned from a love for reading, a pass time I learned from my mother who constantly had her head in a book. You might say that it was a genetic calling. My influences are all over the map: Robert Penn Warren, Elmore Leonard, Stephen King, George Saunders, Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, Adrian McKinty, Dostoevsky, T. S. Eliot, Bob Dylan, Raymond Chandler, Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Ian McGuire, Russell Banks, Annie Proulx, Philip Kerr, David James Duncan, Kevin Barry, Jeff Tweedy, Tana French, Phillip Roth, Nick Cave, John Fowles, Donna Tart, Tim O’Brien.  You get the picture.

But to my first point, this passion for the craft of writing is not of my own choosing. It is something I feel compelled to undertake, and when I’m not working at it, I feel a sense of guilt, as if I had locked these imaginary people in a closet and they were slowly running out of air, banging furiously on the door to be let out and go on about their lives. I was in my late forties before I was mature and patient enough to tackle a novel, and when I was done with the first one, I was immediately onto the next, having discovered that my muse was finally able to wander without constraint.

The books available on this site were self-published. I tried the traditional route and found that I was spending more time trying to get someone I had never met to take a chance on me rather than doing the work. And I realized early on that I really did not care if the publishing world recognized me or not, because that was never the point. The point was and always will be, the work itself.

So if you have made it this far, I offer my humblest thanks. And should you go so far as to purchase a book, then you have my deepest gratitude. Should you enjoy the book, then I have accomplished what I set out to do, and I can ask no more than that of a reader. And should you not enjoy the book, please feel free to contact me and explain what I might have done better. Because like any craft, those who excel are constantly striving to improve.

Thanks for Reading,

JAC