MagicLand

What if an original bedtime story is more than just a story?

Since Gus was a baby, her father read to her every night as their regular bedtime ritual. One evening, Story Time takes a sudden turn from its father-to-daughter activity as Gus began to tell her dad stories about an imaginary place called MagicLand, inhabited by colorful characters who speak with a distinct language of their own.

After several weeks of MagicLand storytelling, daughter and father are visited by Celemaq, a knight from MagicLand, who tells the pair about troubles in her homeland, and their immediate need of the young girl’s help in saving MagicLand.

MagicLand introduces readers to many new characters to the literary world, including Celemaq and several other of MagicLand’s inhabitants, including Patjan, the evil outsider who seeks to take over MagicLand as his very own, and the heroic quartet known as “The Four Horsemen.”

The heart of the story is love, courage, leadership, resilience, friendship, one young lady’s self-discovery of who and want she has the potential to be, and the indelible connection of father and daughter.

Make that 21…..

As of December 2019, it was my longstanding knowledge that I was one of my father’s 19 biological children. Then in March 2021, my mother called one afternoon and broke the news the number had officially increased to 20. Then she called again in November 2024 and we grew again. 

Make that 21 is my journey of learning about 20 people with whom I share a biological father highlighted by frank conversations with my father regarding his personal insight on how this dynamic came to be, his feelings about it then and now, his current relationships with us all, and self-reflection of how this multiverse of creation has affected all the children and himself.

Plus, the story of our personal reunion at my grandmother’s funeral which closed 2019 for us, and the self-exploration of how I see him today and his (and others’) role in my own development as a man and father.

This read will be funny, yet poignant, heartbreaking, yet triumphant, and readers will be riding shotgun in the emotionally driven vehicle of my most personal work.

Parent

A lifelong bachelor with no preconceived plans of being tied down falls in love and marries a woman with a young son, committing to a life of family and shared parenthood for the first time. A tragedy occurs, and the man is left alone to navigate all aspects of parenthood, the development of family, total presence, and assisting the child through many stages of grief and loss.