What This Place Is Now
Just so we're clear
[Howdy. Intention-wise, this edition is a bit of a repeat of the previous one; however, since that post was a bit of a ramble, I didn’t really promote it.]
Simplify, Simplify
For years, I’ve been trying to solve a writing problem with architecture.
A site for this. A blog for that. A newsletter for crime. Another place for fiction. One for stray thoughts, one for longer essays, one for professional work, one for the stranger material that looks at normal life and sees the lathing showing through the plaster. For about 15 minutes, having your stuff in buckets like that can feel like organization. Then it becomes like a series of locked rooms, and I’m walking down the hallway with keys in my hand, forgetting which door I meant to open.
To be clear, I am doing something every ADHD adult (diagnosed at 33, can’t take some of the meds because I have hypertension, yay!) eventually learns to do in order to stay somewhat sane: simplifying.
This is the place now.
It’s not that everything I find interesting fits under one label. I’m a writer and editor who began by covering crime. I’m also an opera singer, a reader, a cat dad, a father, a husband, a Southerner living in New England, and a guy who thinks too much about technology, memory, grief, work, art, and the peculiar and insane weather systems of American life. It’s easy to see how I siloed these things in my mind. That was misguided.
Crime is not just crime—it's human behavior under pressure. Institutions failing or functioning. It is class, fear, myth, luck, cruelty, money, silence. Technology is not just technology. It is labor, language, surveillance, possibility, convenience, dread, and sometimes an almost magically useful tool like the sonic screwdriver from Doctor Who. Music is not just music. For me, it is about breathing, discipline, age, panic, beauty, vanity, surrender, muscle memory, and the body trying to become an instrument before the mind ruins everything. And memory? It is evidence. It is fiction. It is the weather. It is all the rooms you keep returning to long after the house is gone.
So that’s what I want this place to be: a notebook on the things I keep circling because they keep circling me.
There will still be crime here. Probably quite a bit of it. I have written about crime for much of my professional life, and I remain interested in the gap between the headline and the human reality underneath it. I am interested in victims, offenders, families, investigators, reporters, and the audience that gathers around the story. I am interested in what true crime gets right, what it distorts, and what it reveals about the rest of us.
There will be writing about media and technology, especially artificial intelligence and its impact on journalism, editing, creativity, and work. I am more interested in practice than in prophecy, though I’m not above indulging in the latter sometimes. I’m always wondering what truly changes when the machine starts talking back? What still belongs to human judgment? What happens to taste, trust, accuracy, and voice? My opinions are mixed.
There will be personal essays. Some will involve family, grief, age, the South, New England, fatherhood, work, depression, resilience, or the strange business of trying to remain a decent person while also remaining awake.
There will be music. Not music criticism in the formal sense, unless I put on a fake monocle and start using phrases like “interpretive architecture.” More likely, I’ll write about singing, listening, performance, the body, the voice, and the pieces of music that feel less composed than excavated.
There may also be fiction, fragments, experiments, noirish condition reports from the inner switchboard, and dispatches from projects I am building in public. I reserve the right to be strange. I also reserve the right to be clear.
What I’m not going to do is pretend this publication has a narrow beat just to make it easier to describe in a tagline. The beat is attention.
What do we pay attention to? What tools do we trust? When do we avert our eyes? Why does memory sometimes so sweetly lie to us? Why do we repeat scripts even though we know they are harmful? Also, what stories do we inherit? How do we create beauty in our minds when all before us is chaos and wreckage?
SO.
The plan is simple. Look for essays, notes, links, case observations, reading lists, project updates, and the occasional odd artifact from the (figurative—though I do have an old house with a creepy cellar and odds and ends left by previous residents hiding in the shadows) basement. Some posts will be reported or analytical. Some will be personal. Some will be brief. Sometimes I’ll take the scenic route, looking for revelation like a nature photographer seeking a rare flower or bird.
I am not doing this with a grand promise about frequency. Such promises are how a writer builds a little courtroom in his own head and then spends all week on trial, and I am terrible about doing that to myself. I instead aim for steadiness, usefulness, honesty, and range, held together by a recognizable mind.
If you’ve followed my work in crime writing, that will continue. If you’re here for essays about family, memory, music, technology, or the general American carnival of dread and wonder, there will be that too.
If you’re here because you like watching a writer figure out what he thinks in public, welcome. That is probably the truest description of the enterprise.
One destination. Several windows through which to observe the sometimes turbulent weather in my mind. This is what this place is now.