My new book — “Field Blends” — to be published spring 2020

Deviate with me from my normal business applications shtick, just for a moment. As I discussed with Mark Smith on his podcast back in August, I’ve spent the last year writing a novel that I am excited to now say will be published and released this coming spring of 2020. I wrote the following just now on my other blog, Wine:30 Flight.

Field Blends is a story of the world as it is today, consideration to the intersection of modernity, technology, culture, and the people, pasts, and communities that give each of us roots. It is told through the eyes of friends — wine in hand — in the tumult of love and self doubt, against the backdrop of our ever-changing world. It seeks reconciliation of life amongst the monuments, hideaways, and progressive thought of great European and American cities with the legacy of hometowns, mother countries, and family. I have written it to be joyful of the world’s beauty and melancholy of its present failures.

I also shared a brief excerpt that I felt captured the tone and theme. You can read it there. Here I wanted to excerpt a bit that contemplates “the intersection of modernity, technology, culture, and the people, pasts, and communities that give each of us roots” mentioned above. This blog is normally all about software, right?

I returned to my office and passed the time replying to emails. This was apparently what it meant to accomplish a great deal. They never ceased. This, I thought, is how well-to-do, educated children should be told their lives will shake out. I thought about the fellow who had repaired my car as I headed off to college sixteen years earlier. He had been weathered and hard, skin long ago turned to leather, colored and disheveled as only a fellow for whom every dollar had turned on the skill of his wrench could be. I wondered if this was the life he had intended for me in that moment when he thought he was doing his bit to send me off to some brighter future. I wondered if I had let him down.

I’ll conclude with my thanks to those who have encouraged me as I’ve written over the past year, and to those with whom I exchange ideas, musings, and contemplation every day. I hope you’ll think of reading cover to cover when Field Blends hits shelves and e-readers this spring. Thank you!