Monday, November 30, at the Williamson County Public Library: writing Franklin before I’d ever seen it, and one question for everyone in the room.

Meet the litter at the heart of Riverspook—eight young Labradors marked with paint instead of names—and the morning the birds went quiet. Free novella.

The Old Factory Store at 114 East Main is Franklin’s oldest commercial building: Lot 20 in 1799, a juke joint, an 1864 hospital, and now a bookstore.

The Jetson’s Journey reading group guide—six discussion questions, notes for hosts, and how to request a virtual book-club visit with the author.

Landmark Booksellers is real and named in Jetson’s Journey. The café inside it is not. What’s real, what I made up, and the launch-night reading.

The sentence Jetson’s Journey was written to arrive at, from the night before it published—on grief, custody, and a rescue nobody manages into being.

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—kept 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 published September 15, 2026. Kindle was $4.99 through launch day; it is $9.99 now. 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

Photos and video from launch night at Landmark Booksellers, September 22, 2026.