My urban fantasy novel The Arrow is coming out soon through Geminid Press LLC and I cannot wait for you to read it.  I loved writing this story, and I am loving finishing the sequel even more.  These are characters I have fallen in love with, and I hope you will too.

When you look at the acknowledgements pages of my books, you’re always going to find a list of artists’ names somewhere in the line up.  Art is the most important thing, after love.  To me it is.  I know a few wonderful friends who are excellent, powerful and brave artists and they inspire me to be an artist when I write my stories.  They inspire me to make beauty, and to say the true things.

First, meet Laura Alvarez. We were roommates in college, and she has been inspiring me in every way ever since.  Her work shows up in museums, in textbooks, in Los Angeles train stations, in the most gorgeous letters ever written, and somehow miraculously she chooses to send them to me.  On an existential level, I can say that if it weren’t for Laura I might have turned out to be a bad person. It was touch and go for a minute there in college, and she held up a lamp towards a path of integrity and beauty and made it look worth following.

Laura and her husband Evan Hartzell make music, art and poetry together.  Click here for a link to another of her websites, where you can meet DAS and find out more about her.

Below is a copy of the first volume of their art and literary magazine Brackish. It’s full of relevant and sometimes painful work. It speaks simple truth with a quiet voice, but it’s the truth we need to hear or else we’ll be lost.

brackish vol. one

Though my artist, writer, traveler, musician friends are far flung, in my mind we are a sweet commune of Divine beings, living in a Keep of our own.  We are making things, telling stories, and surfing together in the morning before the sun rises.