Blog

Cadeau de Lumière – Louisiana History and Humidity Episode 7

October 18, 2025 | St. Francisville, Louisiana – The Myrtles Plantation | 58F just after sunrise on a cool Saturday morning, October light spilling like pale honey across the lawn, long shadows stretching from the ancient oaks | Coffee steaming in my hand, the only warm thing in a place that remembers colder stories

They say the Myrtles is the most haunted house in America. I don’t know about most. But on a crisp October morning, when...

I did not want the first book to live the world of the government. The Ophiuchus Signal starts in a house. Kitchen, study, a backyard instrument that does not look like a movie. That was the point. Discovery does not always arrive at an observatory. Sometimes it sits in public archives while a man drinks coffee and a family keeps ordinary hours. The setting is a residence because the story is a household that has to decide what to do once the sky answers. Video is the why. Book is out now.

...

Sept 15, 2024 | Baton Rouge, Louisiana (Mississippi River levee near LSU) | 88F, humid but falling, golden afternoon light, faint breeze off the water | First real hint of autumn

There is an old cottonwood I have quietly named Treebeard.

He stands alone on the cutbank where the river keeps trying to steal the land, roots like Entish fingers dug deep into the red clay, refusing to yield. Half the trunk is lightning-hollowed, one enormous limb open to the sky...

Cadeau de Lumière – Louisiana Weekends | Episode 20 – When life forces a change, embrace it.

After years of graduate school, a Ph.D., and a few published articles, I expected fiction to be easier than it was. Not because I thought I was a good writer. Because academic writing had already taught me how to work. You design the study. You run the work. You strip the page down to what the data will support. Descriptors come out. Mood comes out. Just the facts.

That training is useful until you sit...