At heart, I’m a sci-fi writer. Jo often says to me, “Why don’t you write a romance novel?” Uh, no. I grew up on a steady diet of Total Recall, Aliens, Predator, Star Trek, and Star Wars. When I think about writing another novel that won’t sell, I think of these weird sci-fi ideas I can’t get rid of. They sit in my brain until I put them down on this screen here. I’ve written four novels in the last three years. Three of them sci-fi, one of them just bad. Hey, The Canary and the Coal Mine, got me honorable mention recently in The LA Times Book Festival competition, but so far just a lot of rejections.

You write for yourself. Yeah, I keep telling myself that. Ha. It’s a bit of a crock. Yes, I like to write because it does offer me some peace, but I also dream one day of being able to spend more time writing, all day would be nice, and not having to work behind a bar. Maybe The Seasonal Bar will veer more toward memoir than cocktail book or somehow be a mash up of the two? God, my brain is so scrambled I don’t know anymore. Do people even read anyway? I feel like everyone is too occupied by their phones these days to really give a shit. A friend said to me “I’d buy your cocktail book for sure, but it’ll just sit on my coffee table. I would never read it or attempt any of the recipes.”

At one point I just said fuck it and started writing everyday. This was June, 2020. I always wanted to be a writer but never actually sat and did the damn thing. Well, almost three years later I’m sitting here doing the damn thing. I’ve got to say, writing this blog is way more difficult than writing a novel. Trying to come up with something interesting everyday, especially having to do with a bar, well, it takes a lot of planning and preparation. That’s why I’ve just been free writing a bit more lately. I’ve got the feces touch again behind the bar. Not much is coming my way in terms of R&D.

Ah, but the sci-fi ideas pile up in my head like cordwood. The time I spend writing here takes away from what I really want to do. At some point I’ll stop the blog and just go back to writing novels. And I have one in particular I’ve been thinking about for some time. Yeah, it’s dark and grim. Nocturama follows a man, a former bartender who had a genius son. The novel opens at the son’s funeral. The kid killed himself. Yeah, like I said, dark. But this is something that is happening in the world quite a bit and is occurring at alarming rates. The sci-fi element comes later when the father begins to sift through his son’s life. It’s something I always thought about. That when people die, they leave all this crap from their life behind, most of it useless. Anyway, the son, a chemist, left a crazy paper and chemical trail for his father to follow. All sorts of interesting twists and turns. It becomes a bit of a detective story as the father digs deeper into the truth. His son’s true life’s purpose was developing a drug that enabled the user to no longer sleep…But the side effects…Well, let’s just say, they’re quite interesting…

At any rate, I may as well spend the time here developing these stories as well as putting up some chapters. I only get about two hours a day to write and those two hours aren’t always as productive as they used to be. Not with a crazy family. Stay tuned.