Still Plugging Away (at the typewriter!)

Anybody who’s read my blog or followed my career knows that I love to write. When I wrote Ballad of the Northland, it was an “in-between” time for me and my family: Harm & I had just closed the doors on our kennel and had not yet decided which direction we were going to go with the new business, so we had a narrow window of opportunity to try something new, something we might never have the time to try again, hence our epic tale of survival and adventure set in the wild Alaskan bush country.

Since the book’s successful release, much has changed for me and mine–we had our third child and kick-started our new construction business, and these things have seriously impacted my ability to write. Due to time constraints (and a severe drain on my attention span!), I let the blog languish and pulled the reigns in on two other novels I was working on. With that said, I have been keeping the fires of creativity lit, if not exactly roaring. Both novels, The Book of Ten and Modern Machine are alive and well–The Book of Ten is almost half finished and Modern Machine weighs in at about 30% complete; still a long ways to go to get the finish line, but very doable.

Additionally, I’ve been working on a third idea for a novel code named “I Will Live”--here is a brief sample:

***

I Will Live–

At first the man crawled on his hands and knees. Wet brush slapped his face and thorns tore at his clothes, his exposed flesh. The rain continued to sizzle down and to his fear crazed mind it felt too thick, too hot to be a normal rain. To his left he heard the cough of gunfire, most of it from automatic weapons; to his right, the sound of voices, some murmuring, some hollering unintelligibly; a child weeping, a girl calling for her mother. Behind came the sound of another explosion and a greater heat pressed down, rustling the grasses and shuddering the treetops.

 Without warning, his hands found only empty air, and then he was tumbling down an embankment. He rolled and slid through the mud almost ten yards before crashing into a cyclone fence. He was up immediately, fingers clawing into the chain links, wrenching himself skyward, breathing in an agonized whistle. He rolled over the top and only registered the barbed wire after he crashed to earth on the other side. Then he was up and moving again.

 He splashed through a swamp, standing algae covered water and blackwood trees all around. Shadowed forms paced him on either side and he could see a line of houses through the branches ahead. He sprinted that way, but stopped short at the corner of a residential street, fetching up hard against the trunk of an oak tree.

 A line of cars and trucks stood empty, some idling, some in the ditch, others jammed together in the middle, most with doors swung open. A stereo blared, Emeli Sande singing about her man standing right by her side. On the other side of the street was a trailer court packed with 70’s era mobile homes, stretching east to west as far as he could see.

As he watched, a group of men, women, and a few children with torn clothes and dirty, shell shocked faces, broke from cover at the edge of the thicket and ran among the vehicles, soundless but for the slapping of their shoes on concrete, the muffled exertions of their breathing. They entered the trailer court, were swallowed…

***

Thanks for tuning in–more to follow.