• Events

    See you at GAB Fest!

    Each year, the Austin Public Library hosts GAB Fest (Greater Austin Book Festival) to highlight and connect readers in central Texas. I’m thrilled to be participating as a vendor at this year’s event. There’s a full day of programming featuring panels and activities for all ages. Stop by the Author Hall and say hi! I’ll be sharing a table with my partner-in-crime, graphic memoirist Ilene Haddad. We’ll be selling and signing books, and we’d love to see your faces and take a few thousand selfies. (We promise to brush our hair!) See you there!

  • Creativity - Media

    The Internet is the Opposite of Zen

    Periodically, I take long breaks from the firehose of social media, and it’s during these times that I realize, with great poignancy, how little value there is in the constant drumbeat of self-analysis (personal and communal) that has come to dominate public online discourse. As an enthusiastic consumer of all types of media, I have started to feel as though we are drowning in egos, dissolving into a million fragments of artless navel-gazing and opinion. With every ‘think piece’ and ‘long read,’ I feel less informed and more assailed by someone else’s desperate need to be seen and heard. With…

  • Creativity - The Bizniz

    10 Things I Learned Self-Publishing My Debut Novel

    Last week, I had this exchange on Threads with indie author-artist Raul Sauve (@sauvesauve), and another author-artist, Elena Catherine, popped in and asked the question about what we’d learned from self-publishing. I didn’t have time to respond in the moment, and truth be told, I don’t think I’ve had a chance to sit down and account for all my learnings over the past two years. So this week, I decided to write a blog post about it. I’ll start by saying that the decision to go the indie route and self-publish was not taken lightly. I don’t think my choice…

  • Creativity

    We Need Your Vision for Something Better

    During the 2010s, there was a marked rise in dystopian fiction in both print and film. Stories like The Handmaid’s Tale and The Hunger Games gained enormous popularity as millennials became increasingly disillusioned in adulthood. More recently, fantasy – including but not limited to the overwhelmingly popular categories of romantasy and vampire fiction – has taken over as readers seek escape from a world where dystopia is no longer fiction. But I want to talk about a different genre today: science fiction. Specifically, the kind of science fiction that my Boomer parents adored and raised me on. Star Trek. Star…

  • Media - The Whole Enchilada

    The Whole Enchilada on Reedsy Discovery

    I was delighted to wake up this morning to a five-star review of The Whole Enchilada on Reedsy Discovery. Reedsy is a platform for authors, publishing professionals, and readers to connect and discover one another’s work. It’s a great place to find indie works that you may not run across in your searches elsewhere. I have been fortunate enough to find some great reading on this site, so it’s wonderful to see my own novel featured as a ‘must-read’. I’m grateful to reviewer Abha S. for their thoughtful, enthusiastic reception for my debut: “When I watched director Denis Villeneuve’s film Arrival a…

  • Media - The Whole Enchilada

    The Whole Enchilada Reviewed at Diary of a Reader

    Big thanks to Dominique over at Diary of a Reader for her review of The Whole Enchilada. This is, in fact, my first blog review, and I’m delighted (and encouraged) by it. Dominique is fair and honest, and kind with her words, which is all an author can really ask for. But what makes this so special is that she understood the unconventional and intentional structure and pacing of the novel, and embraced it as a literary experience, sitting with the parts that were uncomfortable or unclear, trusting that I – the author – had a reason for telling this…

  • The Q Review

    The Q Review: Kittentits by Holly Wilson

    Imagine, if you will, that James Joyce and Hunter S. Thompson had a love child, and that it was a girl, and that she was living in 1992, keeping a diary, and also, she had a personal vendetta against punctuation. I learned about this book from my fellow author and friend, Roanna Flowers, during a conversation we were having about book cover design. She said she hadn’t read Kittentits yet, but she saw the cover and wanted it on a T-shirt. When I looked it up, I immediately concurred, then hopped onto my Libby app and found, to my great…

  • The Q Review

    The Q Review: Fireflies and Zeroes by Liz Larson

    I found Fireflies and Zeroes by Liz Larson on Reedsy Discover. Since I like a good mystery/thriller, and I love music, a novel about one member of a popular pop-punk band disappearing just as they were about to make a comeback seemed like just the ticket. I’ll start with what I loved about this novel. First, Larson’s writing is technically very good. Tight, fluid, and easy to follow. I threw this thing back in just three days of light reading. Additionally, her character development is aces. I quickly got to know and care about all the characters in this book.…

  • The Bizniz - The Whole Enchilada

    Back to the Starting Line

    The lights have gone down. The crowd has dispersed. The dust has settled. It’s… January (womp womp). 2025 was a wild ride, culminating in the celebration of my biggest creative accomplishment yet: the release of my debut novel, The Whole Enchilada. I’m thrilled with the reception it’s had, and I’m settling into the grind of marketing this thing and trying to get it into the hands of more readers. It’s not an easy task, especially for an indie author without a team of marketing folks and a big-name press behind me. Still, I’ve never shied away from blazing my own trail. I…

  • The Q Review

    The Q Review: The Line of Tepes (Book 1) by E.A. Williams

    I’ll start this review by saying that I am decidedly not a reader of vampire stories. Prior to this, I’ve read one vampire book, and only out of morbid curiosity. It’s not that I think books about vampires are universally bad – they’re just not my thing. But I know E.A. Williams, have interviewed her for a podcast, and have read a short story of hers (which I loved!) that was included in the Mixed Bag of Tricks anthology. So, I fired up the Kindle and got to reading this first installment of The Line of Tepes trilogy. The story…