We’re finishing up House Mountain Views, my newest book, and will be releasing it soon. Right now it’s going to be print only, but I hope to have an ebook version in the near future and I’m thinking about an audiobook. More on that later.
As some of you know, most of my catalog is fiction, so this collection of essays and reflections is quite a departure for me. The inspiration came from two places; my daughter Lindsey gave me a year’s subscription to StoryWorth (one of the best gifts ever, by the way). It’s a year long series of weekly prompts and the responses are gathered into a book. The prompts cover a lot of territory: childhood, travel, family, work, retirement, and a wide range of others. I could choose the offered prompt, change it to a different one, or write my own, and do as much editing at the end as I wanted. I’m currently waiting for the finished product to arrive. Like I said, one of the best gifts ever.
The other source was Claude, an AI bot that I use (along with ChatGPT) for all manner of web searches, etc. (I experimented a little with their writing capabilities and ended up doing major rewrites to what they produced; like what I have heard from other folks’ experience, it was pretty good, but never completely accurate, and, most importantly, it wasn’t my voice). One of the offers that popped up in Claude’s program involved the AI reviewing a short bio of myself and constructing a visual representation of the data, along with an analysis. I uploaded a short (three or four paragraph) bio and the result was, to put it mildly, surprising. That visual representation provided the spark that resulted in the structural outline of the book.
Some of the pieces have appeared in other writings I have done and some are new to this work. The ones I brought over from previous writings were reworked and updated, but I tried to keep the original flavor of all of them.
Since it’s a book about me I suppose the audiobook narrator should be me, but I am reluctant to expose any listeners out there to a full book of my voice. I had tried to read the first book of the Boone Series and my efforts were laughably amateurish. The difference when I hired Tim to do the voice was remarkable. So, I’m uncertain about the whole audiobook thing. We’ll see.
The StoryWorth project and this book have taken most of my time for the last while, which is one reason it’s been so long since I added anything to this website. I’ll post again soon, once the details are worked out, and let you all know when it’s available.