FELLOW TRAVELER is here!

With this piece of key art now (almost) in place, the time is here for Fellow Traveler!

Once my revamped website goes live, there will be content aplenty that explains the origins, themes, and long gestation period of this very personal novel ‘of the grateful dead‘ that is being published on November 1, with pre-orders but already live and shipping now at both amazon and Barnes & Noble. Let it be said for the record here at Edgewater County Confidential that we are pleased beyond measure with the attention and production value brought to the project by graphics designer Emily Kay Songer, as well as Muddy Ford Press and its publishers Bob Jolley and Cindi Boiter—arts angels dwell among us!

Speaking of Edgewater County, a question readers of my prior work might ask about Fellow Traveler is, how does this story fit into the James D. McCallister ‘universe‘ as described in earlier posts? The answer is ‘yes’, but a qualified one—certainly the locales of Tillman Falls, Edgewater County, Columbia, Southeastern University, and the Old Market are familiar and consistent throughout my stories and novels, and FT is no different . . . and yet is an alternate-universe piece of fiction in which the Grateful Dead don’t exist but ‘Jack O’Roses’ does, and George W. Bush never became president but Al Gore did, 9/11 happened but not until 2004. In the Edgewater County universe found in the remainder of my work, these alternate-reality story lines do not exist—the Dead are the Dead in the other novels, and so on. Clearly I want this novel to be of a piece with the rest of my output, which will continue on using the familiar elements and locations, and yet it is in its own little world, too—there’s a particular reading of the book one could make that would fully explain this seeming contradiction, but for the moment, perhaps it’s enough to say, this is my sandbox, and I can play in it however I wish. That’s the beauty of creativity, and of fiction in general—we can make our mind movies and project them into other people’s heads, a rare privilege indeed.

In any case, thank you all for the support, advice, and criticism I’ve received over the years in bringing this piece to fruition and completion. Please enjoy the world of Fellow Traveler, and bookmark this site to continue to the dialog about the book after you’ve read it.

As for me, besides promoting FT I am now moving on into the shopping phase of DOGS OF PARSONS HOLLOW, a recently polished manuscript that’s already getting good feedback from publisher’s row, and may yet have a commercial life outside of the trunk. Reports on this as the news may warrant.

The full, final cover of the novel.