A Pleasant Fiction follows a middle-aged man as he prepares his parents’ home for sale after their deaths, navigating the rooms of his childhood one last time and unearthing long-buried memories. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

The setup came from a very real place. After my own father passed away last year, I found myself in the exact position Calvin is in—sorting through the physical and emotional remnants of a life once shared. It’s a process that’s equal parts grief, memory, and reckoning. The house in A Pleasant Fiction becomes a kind of emotional topography. Each room holds its own ghosts, each item its own story, and the act of cleaning it out becomes a meditation on meaning, family, and what we carry forward.

One of the hardest parts was letting go of the things—not just because they had sentimental value, but because they felt like all that was left. Giving or throwing them away felt like saying goodbye again, and maybe for the last time. But eventually, out of necessity if nothing else, you realize you can’t keep 80 years of someone else’s life in boxes. And when you accept that, something shifts. You begin to understand that what remains isn’t the stuff—just as the people you loved weren’t only their physical bodies—it’s the memories attached to them and the impact they had on you. You can let go of the things without letting go of the person. The love, the lessons, the echoes—that’s what endures. So the house and the process of letting go becomes a metaphor for that deeper truth. It’s not about holding on to what was, but learning to carry forward what still matters.

It seemed like you took your time in building the characters and the story to great emotional effect. How did you manage the pacing of the story while keeping readers engaged?

The pacing was deliberate—almost musical. I wasn’t writing toward a traditional climax so much as riding waves of emotion, like experiencing the movements of a symphony. There are motifs that return, refrains that echo. The structure is non-linear because grief isn’t linear. It loops, it lingers, it ambushes you. You think you’ve moved past one feeling, and then it washes over you again in a different key.

And while the book is ultimately structured around the five stages of grief, I didn’t outline it that way ahead of time. If I had started with that framework, I think it would have felt artificial—too linear and orderly for something as inherently chaotic as real grief. Instead, I focused on the emotions I went through while settling my own parents’ estates and let the story tell itself. And in that process, the five stages revealed themselves organically—in all their messiness and overlap.

There’s also a kind of chain reaction that happens when you’re sifting through memories like this. One object sparks a memory, which sets off another, and then another. It’s not just nostalgia—it’s more like activating a neural network. Each association sparks the next, building its own momentum, and you find yourself pulled deeper and deeper into a sequence of emotional discoveries. That dynamic shaped the book’s rhythm. It’s why the story doesn’t move in a straight line but follows the emotional logic of memory itself.

What keeps readers engaged, I think, is that Calvin isn’t just telling a story—he’s actively processing it, in real-time, with the reader. There’s vulnerability in that. And maybe, if it’s working, there’s catharsis too.

I find that, while writing, you sometimes ask questions and have the characters answer them. Do you find that to be true? What questions did you ask yourself while writing this story?

Absolutely. Writing for me is a form of philosophical inquiry. I’m less interested in delivering answers and more concerned with framing the right questions—questions that keep echoing long after the book ends.

In A Pleasant Fiction, one of the core questions Calvin keeps circling back to is: Did they know how much I loved them? It’s heartbreaking because in some cases the answer is clearly no—and not just among the dead. That realization carries its own kind of grief, but also a kind of salvation. Because for the people still here, you still have a chance. You can say the thing. You can show the love.

There are theological questions too—ones Calvin doesn’t always like the answers to: Is this really the best an omnipotent and omnibenevolent being can do? What is the point of all this suffering? But also more human-scale ones: Are we better off when we don’t get the thing we want? And if so, were we wrong to want it? What is the cost of noble self-sacrifice to those who rely on your presence? Is the best we can do ever really enough when facing a no-win situation?

There’s also a quieter question that haunts the edges of the narrative: Who am I to grieve for someone I barely knew? That might mean a Facebook friend—someone whose life ended up touching yours in ways it never did when you were physically in the same place. There’s an irony in feeling closer to someone through written posts and late-night messages than you ever did sitting across from them in a classroom. But it’s not about the medium—it’s about the substance of the interaction. You can sit in front of someone and still not see them. And sometimes, through the filter of distance or time or reflection, something more real emerges.

Or it might mean an unborn child—someone you never met, but whose absence still lingers. Grief doesn’t always follow logic. Sometimes it reveals what mattered to us more than we understood in the moment.

Some of these questions Calvin voices directly. Others are embedded in his contradictions—how he says one thing but shows another. That tension is intentional. Even when we think we’re being honest, we’re still performing a version of ourselves. Calvin often presents possible answers, but the reader doesn’t have to agree with them. They’re not conclusions—they’re invitations. Sometimes Calvin’s answer is literally, “I don’t know.” The book isn’t trying to resolve these questions so much as asking the reader to sit with them, to feel them, and maybe to bring their own answers to the table.

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

Right now, I’m putting the finishing touches on Coming of Age, Coming to Terms, a companion volume for readers who want to dig deeper into the themes, characters, and questions raised in The Wake of Expectations and A Pleasant Fiction. It’s over 300 pages and really exposes the underlying emotional architecture of the series. It will be available as a free ebook for readers who join the email list and should be released around the same time A Pleasant Fiction comes out—early July.

I’m also releasing a serialized version of The Wake of Expectations—starting with Becoming Calvin—as a more accessible entry point for new readers who might be intimidated by the full novel. And I’m planning to release the first audiobook this fall, most likely beginning with Becoming Calvin as well.

As for what’s next, I’m working on a new novel, tentatively titled Last Summer. It’s still in the early stages, but tonally, you might think of it as The Sopranos meets The Goonies—a 1980s coming-of-age story featuring some familiar faces. It’s sort of a YA novel with dark humor. I’m aiming for a 2026 release.

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