I’m excited to announce that I will soon launch a new novel on my site and out to the web at large. The book is called Disappearances and it has been long in coming, the product of years of work, and I’m nearly bursting at the seams to finish and get it out to readers.

Disappearances tells the story of a young man mentally disconnected. Early one morning he’s awoken from a restless sleep by a plane crash outside his apartment window. Rushing down to the scene, the young man is unable to find anyone – no people, no rescue workers, no survivors. He is alone. Everyone he loves, everyone else on the planet as far as he knows, has disappeared.

Frank’s task is to listen to the young man’s story, help him discover the secrets behind the disappearance of everyone he loves, and most importantly, to reconnect the young man with the rest of the human race. But before the young man can do that, he needs to learn the most important lessons about himself, his father, and how to move forward with his life.

In preparation to launch a new title, there is an endless list of preparations after the story is finished – extensive editing and cover design are first among those. I’ve listed people I’d like to thank in the Author’s Note after the novel, but there is one more person I’ve recently added that I’d like to personally thank here: Levi Montgomery.

Levi Montgomery, aside from being a self-published author and blogger, is also a photographer. I originally approached Levi in hopes of finding a fitting cover photo for Disappearances. He told me that he was interested in helping me, but would first have to read the novel before he knew if he had a suitable photograph. Thus, I sent him my novel and held my breath.

Barely a few days later, Levi responded to me. He’d already read my book in that short time, and although he regretted he did not have a fitting photograph for my book, he sent me a list of every single typo and error he found in the novel. In short, Levi provided another edit of my novel for me. He asked for nothing.

I’m completely blown away by the amount of work Levi put into editing my novel and I can’t thank him enough. Once Disappearances is released, if you like the work and want to contribute to those who made it happen, you can support Levi through purchasing his work, which he sells on his site. If you’d like to support me, you can help me spread my book around the net. But please buy a one of his novels from him, too.

So now I’m in the final editing stages of the work, trying to tease out extra awesomeness from Levi’s suggestions. I’ve also created the cover for book, though I’m still tweaking it. Instead of going with a photograph, as I originally intended, I decided to go with this design:

(clicking thumbnails opens larger images – warning: big files!)

I feel like it conveys the sense of the book in a way that a photograph could not.

Please check back soon – Disappearances will be a big release for me, my biggest so far, and I can’t wait to serve it up, all hot, awesome, and willing.

Thank you for reading.

I’ve made a few small changes to the site that I think are worth pointing out:

Buttons linking to my work on Scribd and Feedbooks are now over on the right, under the rss, email, and twitter buttons.

In interests of getting more of my work out there in multiple channels, I’m in the process of putting some of my writing up on Feedbooks. Currently only Waiting, Time to Get Up, and The Canoe are up there, but Neither a Borrower and another upcoming project will be there eventually.

My tech poetry collection, while awesome, relies too much on formatting to be a good fit for the Feedbooks format. However, you can always find it on Scribd, via mininova (bit torrent), or on my site.

I choose Feedbooks as the next place to expand because stuff from their site is available on mobile phones, a reading method I support. I personally recommend the Stanza application for you iPhone users. That’s how I read Cory Doctorow’s work in digital form, and that’s how I checked on my stuff on Feedbooks.

I also have plans to start putting some stuff up on Wattpad, at least the things that won’t be ruined without formatting, but that’s a project for another day.

As always, you’re free (and encouraged) to send my stuff to friends if you like it. I’m not doing this for the money (yet…haha), I’m doing it for the love. Help spread the love!

Also, in hopes of getting some of my post backlog a little more organized, I went through and updated the tags, as well as added additional categories. A category widget is over on the right, too, under the recent posts.

Thanks for reading!

I’ve just added a new short story to my site and Scribd. Time to Get Up is about a young man who goes with his mother to bail his kid sister out of jail. You can find it in the Short Stories section to the right.

While you’re there, you can also read Waiting, a short story about a young man who returns to his home town for an ex-girlfriend’s wedding.

Thanks for reading! Comments always appreciated!