Evening in Weston, MississippiMoon over the treeline
The veil is thin out here.
I write about ordinary people in small Southern towns on the night the world turns out to be stranger than anybody told them. A body in the fog behind the warehouse. A signal under the sand that has waited a long time for someone to listen.
The Porch
Notes, stories, and news from the backroads. Free to read, nothing to sign up for.
Motivation is a rumor. What gets a book written is a chair, an hour, and a sentence you left unfinished on purpose.
I have talked with close to two thousand writers about how their books got made, and I can count on one hand the ones who said they felt like writing most days. The rest of them wrote anyway. That is the whole secret, and I am sorry it is not more interesting.
Read it · 3 min
New · Read it free online
I took the novel apart scene by scene and rebuilt it as a web edition. Seventy-nine pages, each with its own picture of Weston in the fog. Sound and narration are on the way. It runs in your browser, remembers where you stopped, and costs nothing. Come see the town the way Stu and Watson see it.
No app, no sign-up. Works on a phone. Headphones will matter once the sound arrives.
New · Read it free online
A novel from 2016, taken apart scene by scene and rebuilt as a web edition. Fifty-four scenes, each with its own picture — a grieving novelist, a five-dollar Selectric from a garage sale, and whatever he types on it coming true. Sound and narration are on the way. It runs in your browser, remembers where you stopped, and costs nothing. See what the typewriter does.
No app, no sign-up. Works on a phone. Open the contents, start anywhere, and it will remember.
New in 2026
Tap a cover to flip it over and read the back.
Novel · 2026 · Relic Wars 2
Dr. Julian Cross is dreaming in the tongue of a dead empire. Every night the glyphs sharpen and the coordinates burn deeper. When the dreams lead him and pilot Rhea Calder down through the obsidian halls of Sephon IX, what they find is not an artifact. It is a wound.
Novel · 2026 · Relic Wars 1
Dr. Julian Cross spent years chasing a theory that destroyed his career. Then his rogue excavation in the Egyptian desert unearths a seamless black obelisk that hums with alien logic, and shadowy forces move to seize it. The Builders left more than relics beneath the sand. They left a warning.
Novel · 2026
When struggling novelist Stu Webber follows his dog Watson into the fog behind an abandoned warehouse, he finds one of Weston's most powerful men dead in the dirt. With Audrey from The Raven bookshop, he starts a true-crime podcast about it. In a town where everybody knows everybody, every episode turns neighbors into suspects.
Collection · 2026 · The Weston Files
In Weston, grace rarely arrives with trumpets. It comes in casseroles left on a porch, in a ledger quietly balanced, in flowers blooming out of season. Stories of a small Southern town where ordinary people carry private griefs and mercy moves through the world in quiet ways.
Craft · 2026 · Writing Craft Series 1
It is five in the morning. The coffee has gone cold. The cursor is still blinking. This is not a pep talk and not a ten-step formula. It is the path every working novelist has walked, laid out chapter by chapter from the blank page to a finished, revised draft.
The shelf
Most of my stories start in Weston, Mississippi, a town you will not find on a map. Some of them wander a good deal farther. Pick a direction and I'll tell you where to begin.
Start here
Not sure where to go? Start with The Paper Bag. A small town, a few quiet mercies, and stories you can finish before the coffee goes cold.
Novel · 2026 · Relic Wars 2
Julian Cross is dreaming in a dead language, and the dreams have coordinates.
Novel · 2026 · Relic Wars 1
A black obelisk under the Egyptian sand. A warning nobody listened to.
Novel · 2026
A struggling novelist finds a body in the fog and starts a podcast. The whole town is listening.
Collection · 2026 · The Weston Files
Stories of a small Southern town where mercy shows up in casseroles and out-of-season flowers.
Craft · 2026 · Writing Craft Series 1
Twenty-two chapters, twenty-two tools, and no pep talk. Sit down at the table.
Novel · 2025
A tent revival, a midnight crossroads, and a man who wakes up wearing somebody else's name.
Short story · 2025
It's 1987, the arcade is closing, and a wizard just stepped out of the screen.
Craft · 2025
Essays from a decade of talking with nearly two thousand writers about how the work gets done.
Collection · 2018 · The Weston Files
Seven strange tales from a town where reality has always been negotiable.
Novel · 2016
A grieving novelist buys an old Selectric at a garage sale. Whatever he types comes true.
Audiobook · 2014
A young man, a diner, a storm, and an old stranger who changes everything over a cup of coffee.
Short story · 2014 · The Weston Files 1
A fortune teller who can't tell fortunes gets a midnight visitor who proves magic is real.
Short story · 2016 · The Weston Files 2
Dr. Lexi Danvers is about to reveal where we came from. Some people would rather she didn't.
Short story · 2016 · The Weston Files 3
A Watcher has seen the end of the world before. This time the price has a name.
Short story · 2016 · The Weston Files 4
What if we were visited long ago, and the visitors shaped us more than we'd like to admit?
Short story · 2016 · The Weston Files 5
A TV debunker comes to Weston to film a haunted swamp. The locals warned him.
Short story · 2018 · The Weston Files 6
He dreams the robberies before they happen. Then he has to decide what to do about it.
Audiobook · 2016 · 7S7S 1
An ancient evil his family guarded for centuries just got loose in the Delta. Oliver is the only one who can stop it.
Novel · 2015 · The Mulligan Cycle 1
Connor Mulligan wakes up eighty years in the past with powers he didn't ask for.
Also appears in
Short fiction of mine in the company of other writers. Scroll the rack.
CLONES: The Anthology
OCEANS: The Anthology
Tails of the Apocalypse
Alt.History 102
Chronicle Worlds: Tails of Dystopia
World Domination: A Supervillain Anthology
Apocalypse Weird: Last Meal
Tales from the Canyons of the Damned: Omnibus No. 1
Tales from the Canyons of the Damned: Omnibus No. 2
Tales from the Canyons of the Damned: No. 4
Tales from the Canyons of the Damned: No. 6
Tales from the Canyons of the Damned: No. 7
Tales from the Canyons of the Damned: No. 8
Tales from the Canyons of the Damned: No. 9
About
I live in Mississippi with my wife of more than thirty years. Five children, eight grandchildren, and a house that is rarely quiet. I would not have it any other way.
Most mornings I write. Most afternoons I talk with other writers about how their books got made. Close to two thousand of those conversations now, more than a decade of them, with the people whose names you see at the front of the store. I host the Story Craft Café podcast, and I coach novelists through the long middle of a manuscript, the stretch where most books go to die.
The stories come from the backroads. Small towns where the waitress knew your grandmother. Churches, diners, a bar out past the county line. Places where the ordinary and the strange sit at the same table and neither one flinches. Some days that road runs to a haunted swamp outside Weston. Some days it runs to a dead city under the Egyptian sand. It is the same road. I just drive it a little farther.
Story Craft Café
Every week my co-host Abby Mathews and I sit down and talk about the work. What to do with a first draft, why your villain needs a reason, how to write your way out of a box you put yourself in. Some weeks a working novelist joins us and tells us how the book actually got made. If you write, or want to, pull up a chair.
The Indie Publishing Renaissance
Story Craft Café, Episode 8
Writing Fantasy and Urban Fantasy
Stories That Defy Genre
Keep in touch
A note when a new book is coming, a free story now and then, and nothing in between.
The mailing list is almost ready. Until then, the podcast is the surest place to find me every week.