Volume 2 - Issue 3 - March 2026

Greetings !

March is supposed to come in like a lion and go out like a lamb. This year, it showed up like a chameleon.

Boulder barely saw snow this winter. Instead, the longer days and a run of 60 to 70° afternoons warmed the ground enough to fool half the neighborhood plants. By mid-February, little green shoots were already sticking their heads up, convinced spring had arrived early. Mother Nature likes a good practical joke.

Meanwhile, I drove down to Galveston, Texas, and picked up some shots for a documentary I'm making about a Colorado Springs family with roots there, with Juneteenth as a backdrop. Galveston, of course, is where General Granger issued the final General Order #3 on June 19, 1865, that ended slavery in Texas.

Just as Colorado dipped its toe into a dried-up riverbed, Texas became an ocean. It deluged during the week of my visit. In most places, they say it rains cats and dogs. In Texas, it rains cows and bulls.

I know how to drive in white-knuckle whiteout snowstorms, the kind where the road disappears, and you steer by faith and faint taillights. Driving through buckets of Texas rain turns out to be the warm-weather version of the same bad-weather obstacle course. Slow down, keep the wheels pointed forward, and trust the road is still under there somewhere.

If you haven't driven through Texas, it's about 6 or 7 hours between stops. I decided against driving my electric Volkswagen because the route would have added at least two days to the trip while chasing charging stations.

Colorado, where the plants are confused, the calendar is skeptical, and spring may or may not actually mean it this time.

If March taught me anything this year, whether it’s snow, sun, or falling livestock, the trick is the same. Keep moving, keep your sense of humor, and don’t pack away the umbrella or winter gear. They say in Colorado, if you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes.

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'Vengeance! at Stone Creek' is now available at a bookstore near you

Some novels entertain. Some educate. A rare few refuse to let the reader off the hook.

"Vengeance! at Stone Creek" is one of those books. Order your copy today from your local bookstore.

Set in the long shadow of World War II–era Japanese incarceration, the novel explores what happens after injustice has been legalized and filed away.

Rather than retelling history, it integrates unanswered questions and the uncomfortable truth, deferring accountability indefinitely.

The story tension arises from moral pressure and the question history prefers not to ask: What is owed when the harm was sanctioned by law?

When a soldier fires his rifle from a guard tower inside Camp Arroyo, a Japanese American incarceration camp near Stone Creek, Colorado, the sound echoes far beyond the barbed wire. Order one online or Buy a signed copy

Click and read a review of 'Vengeance! At Stone Creek, and how history is repeating itself...

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What If Hemingway Wrote About a Rodeo Instead of a Bullfight?

What if you took a classic story about love, longing, and a restless generation living in the sorrowful years following World War I, and dropped it into the American West during the Vietnam War?

That’s the question behind my upcoming novel, “What the Morning Brings,” dropping this May.

The story is a loose adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's “The Sun Also Rises,” which entered the public domain in 2022. Instead of expats retreating to the 1920s cafés of Paris, running away from the angst of World War I and the famous bullfighting festival in Pamplona, the story shifts time and place.

The year is 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War. The setting moves to the American West. Boulder, Colorado, replaces enlightened and intellectual Paris, and Cheyenne, Wyoming, becomes the rough and tumble venue where the climactic moment unfolds not in a bullfighting ring, but in a rodeo arena during a heart-stopping bull ride.

Different country. Different war. Same restless questions about courage, love, loss, and the search for meaning.

Presales begin on May 2nd, right in the middle of Taurus, a fixed earth sign ruled by Venus. Like Taurus, I characterize "What the Morning Brings" as grounded, patient, and pleasure-seeking, with a focus on stability, material security, and sensual comforts. The zodiac sign of the bull feels right for a story that trades a Spanish bullring for a Wyoming rodeo.

More soon as publication day approaches.

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Reflections on Lent: A Journey Through Texas

It’s the middle of Lent. Lent is a 40-day, solemn Christian season of fasting, prayer, and repentance that begins on Ash Wednesday and ends before Easter. It honors Jesus’s 40 days in the wilderness.

Common practices include giving up luxuries. I grew up as a Presbyterian and knew about Lent, but didn’t practice the rituals.

These days, I still don’t practice Lent, except to give a couple of hours each morning and respond to Lenten writing prompts. I recently returned from a long drive through the Longhorn State and didn’t forego eating beef. I had to stop at The Big Texan Steakhouse in Amarillo, along Route 66.

Jeremiah writes that those who trust in flesh are like shrubs in the desert, unable to see relief when it comes.

Desert language is appropriate for Lent.

What gives me relief is a change of scenery.

Click to read about my Lenten adventure to Galveston

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Subscribe to my Substack version of the Marginalia

The Marginalia is changing in 2026. Please click and subscribe! Since I read my first byline in the Carey Junior High School Tumbleweed newspaper, I’ve been more interested in the notes in the margins than the polished text in the middle.

The crossed-out sentences. The questions scribbled in pencil that say, “Wait, what about this? That’s where the thinking happens. That’s where the truth sneaks in.

That’s why I launched Marginalia on Substack.

The Marginalia is a home for the in-between thoughts, the ideas that don’t arrive fully formed, the stories that reveal themselves while you’re working them out, and the observations you make when you’re paying attention instead of chasing certainty. It’s less about having the final answer and more about asking better questions.

If you’ve been a subscriber to my newsletter, this is a natural extension of what I’ve already been sharing with you, just more focused, more regular, and more conversational. On Substack, Marginalia is where I publish ongoing stories and essays about writing, publishing, creativity, and the strange business of trying to make something worthwhile in a very noisy world.

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March came in like a springtime chameleon