literature

I See You Glow

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May today overwhelm you with love.
Let the sun in the sky shine with envy above.
Let the birds in the trees sing and scatter their seeds
Only sharp. Sometimes flat.
Fit to accompany but not to lead,
Subservient to your voice.

Every time you open your eyes,
May you see the cleanest light.
Let every purest winter morning still envelop you in warm sunshine.
Let autumn leaves play hide-and-seek,
Chase each other around your yard.
Let any biting cold wind only whisper “Summer isn’t very far.”
Let hope Spring eternally, no matter where you are.

The world is a square peg,
And you’re shaped like a star.
Let your voice ring out across humanity,
So we remember who you are.
Let history endlessly repeat,
Chase its tail for all eternity
In all of time and all reality
There will never be another person like you.

May time be ever kind to you,
Let life be always warm and true;
Lay out the softest carpet beneath your feet
And may you rest in eagles’ nests when sleep is all you need.
Let every dream lull you gently back to actuality,
And every night skew off the light to get you back to sleep.

Should you ever slumber eternally,
May you have the greatest dreams.
The world will have lost one of its most precious things,
But a broken heart, once eons pass, often only stings.

From the poetry collection Aparting, available now.

Aparting

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In the wake of a series of losses, fantasies begin to overlap reality. Folksy, down-to-earth poems set in the modern day intersect with imaginative, absurdist images from the afterlife, as Aparting explores what it means to walk the avenues in between, and to go on living with a phantom heart.

Whether it’s the end of a relationship, the death of a loved one, or the extinguishing of a spark of inspiration or passion, the characters in Aparting find themselves in the trenches of grief, trying to learn how to go on existing as a remaining part of a once-complete whole.

Aparting is a narrative poetry collection about living with loss, and dealing with topics ranging from cancer to politics to space exploration. The characters in Aparting face different struggles as they become separated from people or things dear to them, whether it’s by a could shoulder across the room, or a lost signal across the vacuum of space, or a soul slipped across the veil between this world and the next.

Aparting comes out December 8th, 2023, but you can read or download it here or from Smashwords right now.

Smashwords | Amazon (eBook) | Amazon (paperback) – Coming December 8, 2023

Contents:

The House You’re Building
Life After Money
Concurrents
Only Ever
From Time to Time
Passing the Scene of an Emergency
The Lonely Tavern Keeper
I See You Glow
Counting Sleeps
Big and Strong
My Battery is Low and it’s Getting Dark
Into the Dirt
When We Meet Again
The View Through an Afterlife Window
Sunrise
Three Goodbyes
Beats Per Minute
Gardens and Guitars
Something That Stays
Make Like a Tree
In Loving Memory
Aparting

I wanted this one to be free of charge wherever possible. Amazon does not let authors do that. There’s a chance that enough people using Amazon’s “Report Incorrect Product Information” link on the book page and clicking “I have a problem with the price/ I found a lower price elsewhere” will get Amazon to price match it, but this doesn’t always work. In the meantime, you can download a hopefully Kindle-friendly .mobi file here. I also wanted the book to be available at other retailers by the time I made this post, but it seems the holiday rush has hit, and there is a backlog of books waiting to hit storefronts (on the bright side, maybe that means a lot of people are out there writing books?). So you can read and download the book in PDF format right here on my site.

I hope you enjoy this book. This one took a lot. Much love to everyone out there.

Here’s the second poem from the collection, “Life After Money.”

Life After Money

So now we’re living in the future
It doesn’t look quite like we imagined it would
Too much has changed,
But some things haven’t changed enough
And you’re not here
And did you know?

I remember standing barefoot in the snow
My memories are scraped like faded lines on VHS tapes
We wanted to see who could last the longest,
Then we’d run inside and put our feet by the heater vents

Now it’s the end of December,
And outside it’s seventy degrees.

So I’ve been spending too much time in the past,
Grasping at things I lost I swore to God would always last
And in my heart it’s always summer
But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t snow
And you’ll always be there,
But that doesn’t make it easy.

We memorized lines to remind us we’re free,
Now I see they taught us how to lean on the bars of the cage
And everything I ever thought that flag was waving for,
And all my visions of our life after money died when you did

I used to dream of December
We’d spend a few weeks in the Caribbean
Just because it seemed like that’s what a family would do
If they could be totally carefree

And I wanted to drink with you by the ocean
But our ocean is made of plastic and oil
And I wanted to sit with you in the grass of an alien world,
But they’ll be bought by the wealthy and portioned out wholesale
And you’re not here
And do you know?

I’m so afraid of the future
Every December we’ll remember what it was like
To light a fire in the fireplace
The way you did when I was a kid and Christmas seemed alive

Why would I want to live in the future?
I couldn’t afford air worth breathing
I’m looking back at the past and it’s all smiles and waves
But the past can’t see that I’m screaming,
And you’re not here.

Normbies!

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It’s a different kind of zombie apocalypse.

Everybody knows getting bitten by a zombie turns you into one of them. What took a little longer to figure out is that biting a zombie also changes them back. But there is a cost, and not everyone is ready to pay.

As the zombie threat looms as strong as ever over a post-post-apocalyptic world, perceptions toward the creatures begin to shift, as do those toward normbies—the people who have been brought back from the other side. It’s a new world full of new dangers, and the worst of them might not be the zombies at all…

Normbies! is a collection of short stories that span several decades, surrounding a zombie apocalypse that takes a sharp turn when survivors discover biting a zombie turns them back into a human. The book will be available digitally and in paperback and hardcover starting October 14th, 2022. You can read the first story, “Patient Zero” here: Patient Zero

You can pre-order the eBook now: Amazon – Smashwords

The Foreland

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Centuries ago, humanity mastered space travel only to find themselves alone in a quiet solar system. Everything changed when they encountered the Navigators, a species of aliens capable of teleportation. Not long after building a new home on a distant planet and surrounding it with satellite colonies, the Navigators revolted, leaving the colonies stranded on the far side of the Universe, with no contact with Earth.

Long after Earth has fallen into the realm of legend, agent Kenner Fense works for the Colony Defense Bureau, an organization claiming to keep the peace among the impoverished colonies while the wealthy and powerful isolate themselves on the planet’s surface. But Fense’s latest mission, which should have been a routine assassination, turns his world on its head when he meets a young woman named Ashes and her newfound friend, a captive Navigator.

Fense and Ash find themselves on the run from those who would use the creature’s power to do immeasurable harm, but it’s a small solar system with few places to hide. The chase brings out the best and worst humanity has to offer, and the only safe place to hide may be the only place no one knows how to find: Earth, the Foreland.

The Foreland comes out October 15th, 2021. Digital pre-order links below. Softcover and hardcover editions will be available in the next few weeks.

Apple Books • Barnes & Noble • Kobo • Smashwords • Amazon

This Can’t Be All There Is

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I’ve been sitting on this one for far too long, and I’m excited to finally put it out there.

This Can’t Be All There Is was originally intended to be both a poetry book and a fully recorded spoken-word album. I’ve dabbled in the idea in the past, but this time, I got close. Every song was demoed, and most of them were completely finished, save for a few touch-ups, and one major aspect: the vocals. I never was able to get my voice to a place I liked or could even stand.

But I’m proud of a lot of these poems, so the book is moving forward. The album might come someday. I still have a lot of work to do before I’ll know for sure.

This Can’t Be All There Is contains 27 poems:

Wilderness
The House You Built for Me
We Were
Someday Will Eventually Come
Still
Storms
Graveyard Shift
All My Favorite Songs
Come Back
Variables
At the End of All Things
Take Me Away
When I Went to Bed
This Can’t Be All There Is
Nowhere Road
Worry
I Live Here
I Need You, Summer
Shapes and Spaces
A Long Night’s Conversation
You Harbor
Worth
KALEIDOSCOPE
Noise
Just Passing Through
Hey Sunburn
My Forever

The book will be available November 15, 2019. Its cover might change before then. I’ll also post a selection of poems on my site before release. (Keen visitors will find that a few of them have already been here for years. I promise I didn’t shoehorn them in; they were always a part of this collection. Like I said, I’ve been sitting on it for too long.)

Pre-order the digital edition here:

Amazon • Smashwords • Barnes & Noble • iTunes

To start things off, here’s “Nowhere Road”.

Nowhere Road

Hey, weary traveler
Come with me tonight,
All you have to do is be a passenger.

You can recline your seat,
Roll down the window,
Maybe even get some sleep.

There won’t be anyone on the roads,
Because this is a direction nobody goes.
It’s a way that very few people seem to know,
And the ones who do know better than to take it.

I’ll take you somewhere the lines have faded
And nothing divides us, places
Go by like faces in a crowd,
Faded and drowned out.
You and I and sounds like
Tearing the sky.

I want to see the way the asphalt stretches toward the bottom of the glass,
And how surrounding towns burn down to ashes as we pass.
Watch the fog fight the defroster,
Turn our music up full blast.
And, for once, relax.

Your hands can ride the wind,
And when I want to scream I don’t have to hold it in.
In the driveway or out on the highway, we can cast aside our sins
And leave our virtues in the back seat with our vices and our whims.

If I drive fast enough,
Maybe you and I will blur together.
Maybe time stands still and lasts forever.
We can outrun our pain and all bad weather,
Catch storms in our eyes like your hair catches light.

Hey, innocent bystander.
Take me with you.
I’ll go anywhere your soul is aching to.

I’ll show you places they don’t put on maps,
Hold your hand across old railroad tracks.
We’ll go out to the edge of your heart and back,
Or over and fall forever, if you want.

Just take me somewhere the stars aren’t falling
The buses and cars stop calling
My heart isn’t walled up and cold,
Tone deaf and old.
Here we are and nothing,
No matter how far,
Can tear us apart.

The Afterglow

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Hey there. I’m back again, and I brought another friend with me.

Everyone knows about the afterglow: When someone dies, their spirit briefly visits the living soul who meant the most to them, before quickly fading from this world.

Jake and Emma were normal teens in high school, until a tragic accident claimed Emma’s life. Jake’s understanding of the world is fractured when Emma’s afterglow appears before him—but somehow doesn’t recognize him at all.

Confused, depressed, and in a daze, Jake turns to Emma’s sister Elise for answers, and instead finds a bond unlike any he’s ever felt before. But Elise knows what Jake doesn’t, and the secrets Elise swore to keep could tear the two of them apart.

The Afterglow is a young adult coming-of-age story about ghosts, railroad tracks, summer, and what it means to connect with each other on a spiritual level.

The Afterglow will be available in print and eBook formats July 26th, 2019. You can pre-order digital editions at the links below, which I’ll update as more editions become available.

Amazon ⋅ Smashwords ⋅ Barnes & Noble ⋅ iTunes Books ⋅ Google Play Books

Never to Have Loved at All

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It feels like rain. All the time. Not the good kind that lulls you to sleep, drowns out the city and all its noise so you can get some rest; the kind that ruins parades, sends kids inside, the kind you try to read to, but the thunder scares you and you lose your place. The kind that overflows your gutters, leaves puddles in your path and a cascade right outside your door, so you can run to your car but you’ll still get soaked to the bone. The kind that isn’t warm, it’s cold. The kind that keeps you up all night, quoting Tennyson and thinking about the different kinds of rain.

Two Books. One Post.

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This has been finished for a while, but A Means to an Ens had been finished even longer, so this one had to wait its turn.

cover art by david j. lovato

Two people meet, fall in love, fall out, and fall apart, left wondering what to do with the pieces that remain. A collection of narrative poetry.

Build Yourself Better is a poetry collection, and the final in a trilogy called Pen and Paper, Wood and Nails, which consists of Permanent Ink on Temporary Pages, A Means to an Ens, and Build Yourself Better.

cover art by david j. lovato

The whole trilogy can be purchased as a set inconspicuously titled Pen and Paper, Wood and Nails, which will also include a fourth collection, B-Sides and Rarities, consisting of poems cut from the first three.

All in all, each collection is a set of narrative poetry, meaning the poems tell an over-arching story. Together, the collections form a thematic, loosely-related trilogy.

Pen and Paper, Wood and Nails gathers four poetry collections:

Permanent Ink on Temporary Pages details a narrator’s struggle to find his place in the world as he drifts through parallel universes, replaces the people around him with fictional characters, scatters his poetry to the wind, and keeps the things he can’t bear to lose by writing them down.

A Means to an Ens follows the last man on earth. Years after waking up to find himself seemingly alone in the world, the narrator heads out on a journey to find any sign of life in a desolate place, but is instead confronted by the ghosts of his past.

Build Yourself Better chronicles two people who meet, fall in love, fall out, and then fall apart, and what they do in the aftermath with the pieces that remain.

B-Sides and Rarities features poems originally cut from the above collections.

Build Yourself Better and Pen and Paper, Wood and Nails will be available in eBook and print formats on February 29th, 2016. Because the chance to release a book on February 29th doesn’t come around very often.

Before then, you can look forward to previews of a few of the poems by keeping an eye here, especially on my Scenes page.

Thanks for everything.

Pre-order links (more will be added as they become available):

Build Yourself Better: Amazon, Smashwords, Google Play

Pen and Paper, Wood and Nails: Amazon, Smashwords, Google Play

A Means to an Ens

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A Means to an Ens

A Means to an Ens is a poetry collection, and a spiritual successor to Permanent Ink on Temporary Pages. A Means to an Ens follows a much more linear, fictional narrative, and tells the story of the last man on earth.

The collection is about half as long as Permanent Ink, so it felt wrong to slap it into a paperback and sell it for the same price. I wanted to do something a little more special with it. My first thought was to record it as a concept album, but I’m bad at that and would probably never finish it.

What I ended up doing was an extension of my Scenes project. Each of the poems in A Means to an Ens has been placed over an accompanying picture. These range in size and dimension, and the idea is for the reader to be able to zoom in and out, scale it, scroll it, maybe even rotate it if they so choose to get the fullest experience from reading the text.

Thus, this collection is presented as an image album. It goes in chronological order, and text should be read in columns, from left to right and top to bottom (so the farthest column to the left, read from the very top to its very bottom before moving on to the column to that one’s right).

For those willing to overlook the cost for the length of the work, a physical edition (minus the images) is available, but that’s entirely optional. I also won’t hide that I’m working on a much more substantial collection featuring all of the poems you’re about to read and more, so if you’d rather hold off on buying it, I won’t mind.

Enough of my babbling. Please enjoy A Means to an Ens by clicking on the link to the next page.

Front Cover ⇒

Or, if you prefer, you can download the collection of images by clicking here: Gallery

You may also download it in eBook format by clicking the following links: .mobi, .epub, .pdf

And the print edition can be found here: https://www.createspace.com/5953496

In the Year of Our Death and Zombiemandias – Available Now

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In the Year of Our Death, the sequel to After the Bite and In the Lone and Level Sands is now available in print and eBook formats at various retailers, and should go live at several more over the next few hours.

In the Year of Our Death

It’s been two years since the zombies first appeared and changed the world forever. Keely and her friends escaped the hell of Seattle and settled down near an abandoned radio station. Bailey finds herself caught up with a ravenous group of survivors. Georgie has set up a courier system to move mail across the remains of America. Will and his friends—all of them orphans now—are out of water and have to leave their quiet suburb for the first time in their lives. Nelson, the engineer charged with running Hoover Dam and powering the American Southwest, breaks his glasses and must wander the wasteland nearly blind looking for a replacement.

Adam, however, knows the truth about the zombies: They aren’t monsters, they’re angels, sent by God to cleanse the world of the survivors, and Adam and his Church of Lesser Humans were put here to help them do it. Armed only with faith, a bus, and the steadfast rule to never allow harm to come to the zombies, Adam knows Judgment Day is coming, and will stop at nothing to herald its arrival.

You can read a sample chapter here as well as download samples from the retailer of your choice.

Store Links (more will be added as they become available):

Amazon • Google Play • iTunes • Barnes & Noble • Smashwords • Kobo • Paperback (CreateSpace store) • Hardcover

The paperback edition should be available through Amazon’s website and Barnes & Noble’s website soon.

Also available is the collected edition, Zombiemandias: In the Zombie Apocalypse Collection, an eBook that includes After the Bite, In the Lone and Level Sands, and In the Year of Our Death.

Zombiemandias: In the Zombie Apocalypse Collection

Amazon • Google Play • iTunes • Barnes & Noble • Smashwords • Kobo

Thanks to everyone who makes what I do possible. This includes you, the reader, without whom I’m just sitting here shouting random nonsense into a void. Thank you.