Happy Publication Day

Happy Publication Day to The Island of Small Misfortunes. This book was a journey for sure. I wrote the bulk of it pre-pandemic, then finished it in the early months of 2020. The manuscript was a total mess until the very end, when suddenly everything fell into place like a game of Tetris.

I’ve discovered with time that every book I write is a reply to the previous one. A Season of Whispers, for example, resulted after I became burned out (temporarily) by Smedley and nonfiction in general, which led to a period where I mixed history and fiction. Likewise, with Island I wanted to lean more heavily into the metaphors and language of Season while chasing the ambiguity of history, both personal and otherwise. One friend said she caught Raymond Chandler vibes off protagonist Sequoia Owen, which I now see is the bleed-through from that emphasis on description by metaphor.

Many thanks to my publisher Regal House Publishing for believing in the book and to my publicist Layne Mandros at Books Forward PR for a great campaign. And how about that cover? I could not believe the artist created it in Starry Night Post-Impressionism, my absolute favorite painting style. My jaw dropped when I first saw it and still does.

All of my books are messages in bottles thrown into the ocean. May the scribbled note inside The Island of Small Misfortunes bring you some enjoyment.

The Island of Small Misfortunes is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and bookstores everywhere. Please consider purchasing it directly from Regal House or support your local indie bookstore through Bookshop.

I will be touring to promote Island this spring. Stay tuned for dates.

Alternatives to Amazon

Here on the site, I list all of the marketplaces that offer my books but I try to be agnostic when it comes to a reader’s choice about where to buy. If you’re excited to read my latest novella, The Island of Small Misfortunes, but you don’t want to support Amazon, you have several alternatives.

You could purchase it from the publisher, Regal House. They’re a fantastic indie press based in North Carolina and buying direct is the best way to support them.

You can also buy it from Barnes & Noble. But they’re just another corporation like Amazon, you say. Yes, but it’s hard to portray them as much of a villain in the current landscape. Under the leadership of James Daunt, B&N has leaned into greater individualization and self-rule with their stores, and as a result many store managers in Connecticut have generously hosted me and the HWA chapter on numerous occasions. I truly see the modern B&N as an ally for authors and small publishers.

Probably the best option, however, is to buy the book using Bookshop. If you don’t know how Bookshop works, you start by selecting an independent bookstore you want to help. It can be your local shop downtown or that one halfway across the country where you picked up a beach read on your last vacation. After you’ve chosen, you buy the book, it’s shipped to your house, and the profits go to that indie bookstore. It’s an amazing service and I highly recommend it, even if you’re not Amazon adverse. As of this writing, Island is also discounted by more than a dollar on Bookshop, so you can save a little too.

Invisible Work

Back in the fall I attended a party where a distant acquaintance commented that I seemed to be busier lately. By “busier,” the person meant the imminent publication of The Island of Small Misfortunes in March.

Behind the comment lay an assumption that somehow I wasn’t busy before Island was publicly announced. This is one of the frustrations of being a writer. Nobody actually believes that writers and authors exist — to most we are Bigfoots and Mothmen, creatures that exist purely in theory or in third-hand accounts by friends of friends, yet are never met face to face.

This is largely because the work we do often goes unseen. When a book lands on a table at Barnes & Noble, the reader may recognize the writing that went into it but probably not the countless hours that went into researching it, revising it, pitching it, editing it, marketing it, or any of the other invisible labor baked into its seemingly sudden and mysterious appearance at the bookstore.

This is further magnified when you consider that many authors also do writing that doesn’t result in books. A friend of mine runs a business writing corporate communications, and while she’s one of the most successful writers I know, very little of what she produces is seen by the general public. When I tell people that a large part of my freelancing over the years has consisted of editing and ghostwriting, they often give me the same look flashed by a red snapper lying on a bed of ice in the seafood department at Whole Foods. It has been my experience that few believe a writer can be busy in the absence of a firsthand tangible result of that busyness.

All of this is a long-winded way of me saying I’ve been very industrious lately, literally working seven days a week. When I’m not busy marketing The Island of Small Misfortunes (available March 25!), I’ve been ghostwriting another memoir project as well as banging away at a separate, high-priority, top-secret, I-wish-I-could-tell-you-more project.

I’m also a member of the planning committee for StokerCon 2025, to be held this June in Stamford, Connecticut. I am in charge of the Author Readings, as well as some informal responsibilities like menu planning. If you’re an author who has signed up to read at StokerCon, my intention is to have the reading slots finalized (more or less) by the end of April, after we figure out the programming. I know it can be frustrating to sign up for an author reading and then not know when I’m slotted to read until the very last minute, making it difficult to plan an itinerary for the con, so again, I hope to have a good idea of who is reading when by May 1. I will be contacting all authors when the schedule is live.

In the meantime, I must once again vanish in a cloud of brimstone. Work calls.

Cover Reveal!

In the summer of 1898, Sequoia Owen accepts an invitation from his estranged uncle to visit his family’s summer home on Todeket, a private island off the Connecticut coast.

Yet the house, constructed by Sequoia’s unstable grandfather and the site of his cousin’s mysterious death, is a strange place. None of his odd relatives, who seem to have sinister agendas of their own, can agree upon the origin of the house, nor do they all believe the sightings of a ghost that haunts its halls, said to appear before tragedy strikes.

Trapped on the island by a storm, Sequoia must unravel the enigma of Todeket before the next life lost is his own.

The Island of Small Misfortunes will be published March 25, 2025. Pre-order is available now from Regal House.

NecronomiCon 2024

I’m very excited to read a short story at NecronomiCon 2024 in Providence, RI, on Sunday, August 18.

I will be reading my stories “The Half That Matters” and “An Incident on Mulberry Street” in the Narragansett Bayview Room of the Graduate Hotel, 17th floor, at 2pm.

I will also have a few copies of A Season of Whispers available for sale.

If you’re attending this year’s convention celebrating weird fiction, art, and all things strange, I hope to see you there.