ON SALE NOW!
Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort During the Time of COVID-19 Proceeds go to Book Industry Charitable Foundation to help support local independent bookstores.
Find the e-book, audio, and paperback version here:
*I’m personally featured in the e-book and audio book formats!
The paperback version* and more information about the book can be found here.
An excerpt from my debut novel, Innate:
BIRTH
Subject Name: Mordem Jara.
Mechanism of extraction: community retrieval following abandonment.
Both parental units are unincorporated. One expired, the other has gone missing, departed for the uninhabitable zone, it’s projected they last two weeks.
He remains.
Aged three hundred and sixty-three days.
Interracial male, philosophical and theological state untampered.
No familial ties to any political, social, or religious organization.
No history of cognitive disorders.
Alert the caretaker.
He’s the one.
###
Inspire. Expire.
Inspiration. Expiration. Inspiration.
Standing on the far side of bronze-colored doors, I took in the sight of someone that had
everything and nothing to learn.
Up and down.
Left and right.
What is direction when you’ve been given space?
What is humanity without influence, without limitations?
Where does the ego go when there is nowhere for it to run, no life to take hold of?
Before me, glimpses of bias. But without it, there is no place for curiosity to exist. The land around us can become a dream, a utopia built upon the wasteland if only we have the courage to allow our minds to run wild when we shut off the light.
Inspiration received from expiration.
Eyes shut, and there in vision stands the reciprocity—a city on a hill—in place of their collective indolence and squalor.
I stepped closer to the glass, lifting the pen again.
When The Separation began to take place, many looked up for the first time at a reality they didn’t recognize. After decades spent with heads craned toward the next distraction, the masses wondered how something like this could happen. How could the division cut deep with such haste?
It wasn’t sudden.
Ravines don’t happen on spontaneous accord. No, the river of divisiveness ate away at our very humanity, and once in, it cut ever deeper but no one gave a dam. We flowed on with the stream of apathy and around us everything got lost in the flames, leaving few resources of use left among the dusted fragments.
But it’s not the end. It’s not for gratuitous reasons that the forest burns. Death was never the conclusion in any story. Though the words may end near the climax, they are always only the beginning. The sun still rises and falls, and we rise and fall with it.
Around me, a library of stories—endings and beginnings. The sun drifts below as someone gasps for a final breath of air from a life violently stolen. Another second passes. A baby is born into peace with a wall of odds built against them. Lusters make love, lovers make joy, children make dreams, adults make do, activists make plans, followers make numbers, the found make praise and the lost make uncertainties.
And, through it all, everything continues to move onward.
Persistence. Furtherance. Onward.
The sun rises and falls, we all live and leave just the same, and I will be among them.
My words among the pages, the weapon tucked in close to the binding.
May it begin.
…
Other pieces of my work: