Tuesday, September 22, 2026 · 6:30 PM CDT Landmark Booksellers · 114 East Main Street, Franklin, TN. The bookstore in Jetson’s Journey is real. Just one week after the book arrives, we’re gathering where it belongs—on the same Main Street the novel walks through. Reading, Q&A, and signing at Landmark Booksellers. Jetson—the real one—will be there. The book moves through real places in town: walks along the Square, mornings at Merridee’s, the quiet weight of these old streets.

Six real Franklin, Tennessee places in Jetson’s Journey—Landmark Booksellers, Main Street, Merridee’s, Gray’s, the Animal Center, Timberland. No spoilers.

A signed hardcover of Jetson’s Journey joins the Heritage Collection at the Williamson County Public Library—under lock and key until publication day.

“He had a rough start.” That is the whole of it. Five words, spoken on a porch in Chapter Two by a woman who is about to leave the planet for three years and cannot stay long enough to explain. Michael Sawyer does not ask what she means. He is fifty-five, days out of a job he gave six years to, and in no condition to ask anyone a follow-up question. So the line just sits there. It sat in my drafts for about a year too. This post is about what was on the other side of it. Who

Riverspook opens with a young Labrador coming awake in the pre-dawn dark because something outside is wrong. He can’t see it. There is nothing to see. Writing that page taught me more about sensory craft than anything else I’ve done, mostly by showing me how lazy I’d been about it. Sight is a snapshot. Smell is a timeline. This is the sentence I kept coming back to. You walk into a kitchen and see it as it is right now: dishes in the sink, light on the floor. A dog walks into

There is a black Lab on the cover and the book is not about a dog. A novel about a man who loses nearly everything, and the one thing that will not leave.

Jetson’s Journey publishes September 15, 2026. Kindle is $4.99 through launch day, then $9.99. Paperback, hardcover, and a launch night in Franklin.

The first line of Riverspook is about a smell. Not a sight. That was the decision that made the whole book possible, and I didn’t arrive at it on purpose so much as back into it after everything else failed. What the book actually does One clarification before the craft talk, because the title of this post oversimplifies. Riverspook isn’t narrated only by a dog. Most of it is, in first person, present tense, from inside a black Lab called Red. The rest cuts away to the humans

Before he was Jetson, he was Red—a young Labrador at Riverspook, marked with a dab of paint while he waited for the family that would name him. Riverspook is his origin story. Five Labrador siblings escape before dawn when something dark approaches. They cross a swelling creek and survive a night in the wilderness that will teach them what they were born to be. A contemporary literary novella in the tradition of Watership Down and A Dog’s Way Home, told in Red’s own voice. Th