This stack represents books I have written or appeared in to this point. Never mind my other published short stories and binders of tear sheets from 300 music and film interviews conducted and more than a 1,000 media reviews.

Miniscule to many of my peers. The more pros I have made friends with this year, the smaller I feel. My life’s mission and utmost desire is to triple this at a minimum in my remaining years. May that be a long, fruitful road. The biggest difficulty in my recent years is reinventing myself into a fiction author, specifically a horror author, after 16 years as a music and film journalist, an NHL analyst, beat reporter, local photographer and serialized superhero scribe. It’s been a humbling ride rising up from a nobody to a music industry described A-lister to a nobody again.

Writing was never a hobby for me. Just ask my friends, family and high school and college classmates. It was a side hustle when times were hard and we needed all the coin we could get. Eventually, that took the love out of what I was chasing after. There are days I lament not being in the music racket, but this year, I have been doing band press releases on the down low for an LA publicist who I am proud to see her shop boom. I just got my first freelancing pay from Rue Morgue magazine. It all starts to bring back that tickle in my heart, that flame of passion.

I want to thank those who have supported and bought Behind the Shadows in the two short weeks it’s been out. My best sales launch to-date! I will soon have another anthology to add to this stack when my story “Good Day for a Seven Nation Army” appears in the Maryland-themed Ole Blue Claw: Tales From the Crustier Side of Maryland.

I give this my all and I do my absolute best not to shirk in defeat reading such wonderful books by notable authors, some of whom I am now lucky to call friends. I have a woman who kicks my ass whenever I say I suck or question why I want it all so badly. I do want it, though, and the mission is always the mission until it’s not. To the divine which is always at elbow’s reach, may the latter come only with my final breath.