The Wake of Expectations is a raw, poetic unraveling of self in a world where dreams, disillusionment, and the pressure to perform collide. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

I’m totally Gen X and that rawness of self-expression—that disillusionment, too—that’s a function of my generation, a by-product of our obsession with authenticity. We were probably the first generation told we could be anything we wanted to be, but we were largely left to figure things out on our own. That contradiction creates an inevitable gap between expectation and reality.

On a more personal level, I’m a huge Kevin Smith fan. I remember him talking about not seeing his friends or his world represented on film, so he decided to make it himself. And that was mostly the impetus for writing this book: a desire to see our version of reality represented somewhere—to create something of artistic permanence to stake our claim that we were here, too. Honestly, I would rather have made a movie or a TV series, but writing a book was just more practical.

Are there any emotions or memories from your own life that you put into your character’s life?

Pretty much everything in my main character’s life is rooted in emotions or memories from my own. The story is fiction, but it’s emotionally true. Like Calvin, I wanted to be a musician. I had a girlfriend who dumped me when she went away to college. I had differences with my parents. But more than anything, I wanted to capture the longing, the frustration, the impatience—the alienation in that process of becoming. That feeling of champing at the bit, staring at a world of possibility, but being unable to get out of the starting blocks. It’s personal, but it’s also generational. Ironically, I never really felt part of my cohort, but that’s exactly what made me representative of it. I tried to capture that paradox in the book.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

I wanted to ask questions more than present answers: What do you do when your dreams come true but don’t live up to the hype? Is it wrong to want something you can’t have? Is it sometimes better not to get what you want? And how do you become the person you’re meant to be when you don’t even know who that is yet?

A recurring theme is the desire to be fully seen—but never quite achieving it, even among people who clearly love you. That’s a major part of Calvin’s disillusionment. At his core, he’s searching for connection on his terms, not anyone else’s—and that proves elusive. He’s caught in this constant push-pull: authenticity with isolation vs. connection with compromise. And again, I think that tension is a very Gen X dilemma.

What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?

The next book is A Pleasant Fiction: A Novelistic Memoir, and it releases on July 1—just a month after Wake (June 3). It follows the same group of characters 25 years later, and the proximity in release dates is no accident. A Pleasant Fiction is a follow-up, but not exactly a sequel. It’s a very different book—slower, more meditative—and it reframes everything in the first book. Wake is a complete work on its own, but A Pleasant Fiction is essential reading if you want to fully understand it.

I actually wrote the first draft of Wake over 20 years ago. So that book carries the reflections of a 30-year-old looking back on his twenties. The next one captures a 50-year-old grappling with the challenges of middle age. Together, they form a diptych—a two-panel meditation on the passage of time, told authentically from opposite ends of the timeline. It’s more of a dialogue than a sequence, tracing the coming-of-age through the unbecoming of middle age.

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