Author’s Blog

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I've been writing The Stars Are Full of Souls for a ridiculously long time now. And not just because I'm a great procrastinator that hides my creations in the bottom of a closet. But also because I had to get through some things in life to bring these collections of thoughts together in a small collection of stories worth reading.

For me, writing fiction is like making a big vegetable soup. And the fresh vegetables - that's the stuff that's real. The vegetables right out of the garden? That's the stuff that really happened. The vegetables are all truth. And then I wash them off and I clean them and chop them up. I cook them in particular order; that's the plot. I add seasoning and spices - these are the embellishments. And I pour them all into a stock prepared by boiling the discarded bits and scrapes of them. Now it's becoming something else. Now it has more than it was when it was just simple bits and chunks of truth. Now I let it cook and simmer it up and bring it to a satisfying conclusion. Now it's unrecognizable in taste and smell from the garden fresh reality. Now it's a work of fiction.

The Stars Are Full of Souls is very much a project hewn closely to many truths. It contains bits of me from all the way back to when I was a kid, to all the way up to therapy as an adult understanding those kid parts for the first time. Ideas I've had that I've no other way to present. Stories I would never get to tell unless threaded through some sort of construct - some sort of soft presence suggesting that Heaven and Hell dwell within the stars of the cosmos. That things in life that we can't explain transcend religions and generations and notions of certainty.

And I wanted to create a platform. A string of consciousness where I could flit in and out and write whatever story I wanted to write as long as I connected these small tenuous dots of death, heaven and hell, and some of my own constructs between religion and mythology.

Plus, for me - I don't know about you - but it's a real tear-jerker set. Spoiler alert, but the stories are deliberately built to make you cry. And it was hard enough just facing up to getting through writing them, much less, every next revision, and proofread and edit, and reexamining, and rewriting, and pushing that broken heart up a hill just to make the work better. Hopefully.

So it took fifteen years to write and produce, and it takes about an hour-and-a-half to read. I hope you find something in there that's worth it.