Top of the Mountain Book Award

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With equal parts excitement and disbelief, I’m humbled to announce that Fall Risk has been awarded the 2017 Top of the Mountain Book Award in the nonfiction category! This is the first time I’ve won an award for any writing, let alone a book-length manuscript. I am, for once, speechless. A special thanks to Northern Colorado Writers for sponsoring the award, and to all the judges and people who made it possible. Winning the Top of the Mountain Book Award is a huge step towards publication. As part of winning, I’ll have an opportunity… Read More

Surrounded by the Sound

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Just a quick note to tell you about a recent writing project that’s just been published: Surrounded by the Sound is a collection of essays about music that has changed people’s lives. Created by Austin Powe, the series recently launched its second volume, with new essays being published each week from a diverse and inspiring group of writers. You can check out my contribution here. Check back in with Surrounded by the Sound weekly or subscribe for updates so you don’t miss any of these fantastic essays! And thanks to Austin for inviting… Read More

No Time for Novels

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Yesterday, I wrote rather negatively about consumable content. Among other things, I argued that people no longer have the attention spans that they used to, that we flit from one thing to the next, consuming without thinking and assimilating without understanding. Today, I’m going to talk about how those lost attention spans have affected the art of the novel. A few weeks ago, a rather drunk friend and I sat at our neighborhood bar and somehow got into conversation about fiction and nonfiction. He is not a writer, and we… Read More

Some Consequences of Consumable Content

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In the last almost-year of attempts at freelance writing, more than anything I’ve seen the word content. Content marketing. Content generation. Content creation. Content calendar. Social content. Content strategy. Writing today is about churning out consumable content. Not only that. There must be prolific consumable content. Push out new material every day, twice a day, even more. Make sure your content is SEO optimized (an ironically redundant phrase). Share your content with all of your followers, fans, and friends. Share it repeatedly. Force your consumable content upon the world until… Read More

Kidney Donation Anniversary, Petrichor, and Hope

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Belated Happy New Year! By now, I’ve probably lost a fair bit of attention given that I haven’t posted in over two months. That’s okay. We’re going to try to get this started again. Not much has changed in 2017, but I have some positive things to share nonetheless. To start with, yesterday was my two-year kidney donation anniversary. The recipient, Stephen, and I decided that we’d celebrate by going to dinner at the same place we did last year, a lovely little Italian spot called Oregano. While last year’s… Read More

Esther

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Esther

I haven’t had a mind to do much writing lately, but I briefly crossed paths with inspiration a week or two ago and wrote a short story. It’s based on a song called Esther, by Phish. The song tells a story over composed music, so there are only snippets of narrative. I took that narrative and expanded on it. Fair warning: it’s a really weird story. That said, it’s perfect for Halloween. Esther Late one fall night, when red leaves still clung to the crooked fingers of trees, little Esther stood alone… Read More

Ready Player One

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If we’re honest with ourselves, the 80s were a dark time in American history that no one wants to repeat. (Well, almost no one. Keep reading.) Our world thrived on neon plastic, shitty synth music, too much cocaine, implausible action movies, boxy hardware, pixelated software, grainy videos, and the third Godfather movie, which probably could have started and ended this list at the same time. Yet a whole generation of people exists—my generation—whose nostalgia is trapped in that forsaken decade. Because we were children at the time, we have fond… Read More

Phish, Dick’s Sporting Goods Park, 9/4/2016

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Night Three. The night of the heart. According to the field wristbands. And heart is exactly what Phish put into their final two sets to close out the Dick’s Sporting Goods Park run and the 2016 summer tour. A slight and welcome chill accented the crisp Denver air as phans awaited the band to take the stage. Security seemed to have backed off a bit except for the grumpy old man who made me throw out my THC gummies. (Don’t worry, I always have a backup plan.) The collective mood… Read More

Phish, Dick’s Sporting Goods Park, 9/3/2016

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If ever the first show of a three-day Phish run seems like it can’t be topped, stick around for the second at least. The air blew just a little colder, a little earlier on the second night, with threats of minor rain alive over the mountains. Prompts for police to dispatch tasers returned to a comfortable zero preferred by phans, most of whom would rather see a show cancelled than someone get hurt. Tortillas still flew as high as the revelers in the two-hours before Phish took the stage. In short, another… Read More

Phish, Dick’s Sporting Goods Park, 9/2/2016

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There’s no place like Colorado to see a Phish show. Under the backdrop of the Rockies, phans from all over the country pour in to the pioneer of legal pot and set up vendor tents and food trucks in dusty parking lots across the flat landscape of Commerce City. Older and shockingly wiser than they used to be, people carry rain gear and coolers and even pets into a facility that prohibits pointy umbrellas, coolers, and even pets. It’s a partial utopia where, for some inexplicable reason, the powers that… Read More