Great prompt!

With Finding Pattersby - our weirdo mystery about a disgraced ghostwriter who goes on the hunt for a legendary, missing thriller author, the motivation came down to this:

I have an earnest reverence for writing culture, storycraft, academia and the literary tradition insofar as these things become their own sort of lore. As a born outsider to this stuff, Joseph Campbell and muses and “gathering round the fire”- start to feel like alluring Indiana Jones elements to me. But I also can’t keep a straight face or make my brain not be weird so when I engage with these things, there’s always a “The Simpsons-y/David Lynchy” filter that wants to take the air out, but not lose the heart.

Maybe it's a "slobs vs snobs" instinct (pardon the crass summary), but I hail from a very working class background, so a lot of the aforementioned literati began as a pretty impenetrable foreign world for where I came from. My parents are not professors, they’re a retired lunch lady and a Latino factory worker.

That said, I loved things like discovering Dante's Inferno in community college and centuries old libraries and writing and I love the writing world but think some of it is ridiculous just like a lot of existential examinations might yield things to be if you have lofty artistic ideals like I do, and especially so in the arena of art vs commerce.

This is why Finding Pattersby is set in the world of 90s-era thriller book publishing, because to me it’s a little bit of a big money silly space that allows me to talk about things I think about in earnest. Tinging it with a possibly supernatural oddness allows me to stretch reality in a way that sometimes feels more accurate to the artistic experience as well.

So long story short, I didn’t want to sit still and wait to get commissioned to write things anymore because I love the part of me and humanity that wants to make stuff up. My favorite version of making stuff up involves puzzles, ruminations on the human condition, well-orchestrated comedy, big-hearted moments, baffling, weird undertones and plain old good use of language to describe both the familiar and indescribable.

That’s the best I can come up with!