Publication set for my next Great American Novel
I’m proud and thrilled to announce that my long-awaited next Great American Novel, The Space Coast Tatler, will be published this spring.
This book has been in the works a long time, and it’s ready. Tentatively, it will launch in late May, 2026. (Exact date is still under evaluation.)
Like The Roswell Swatch and The Murder Plague, this novel is a thriller with a fresh story, a fast-pace, high-stakes, memorable locales, and unforgettable characters.
The Space Coast Tatler is about America’s last, great, intrepid journalists stumbling onto a domestic terrorism plot, set on the doorstep to Kennedy Space Center.
The cast includes a small-town newspaper publisher who hustles pool and carries a gun, a green reporter who clumsily attracts trouble, a kleptomaniac who speaks to ghosts, a rocket scientist who flips burgers, motorcycle gangsters who feed bodies to gators, and a billionaire with dreams for lower-Earth orbit domination and who is seeking access to nuclear bomb materials to help make his dream come true.
At the heart of the story is ink-stained wretch Mac MacGregor, who believes his defiant, little, tabloid newspaper, full of crime news, entertainment, and beach babes, still can make a difference. Reporter Stevie Guthrie figures Mac’s feisty little rag just might offer him journalism training like no place else. Together, before long, they’re in a battle to break the biggest story of the paper’s history—and to stay alive long enough to publish it.
The incomparable Barbara Russell at Blohm Graphic Design has produced a fabulous cover that veritably screams the story’s themes and moods. More on the cover soon, when I get to a big announcement of the cover reveal.
I’ve decided to self-publish because I’m now convinced that self-publication, done right, has far more potential for quality control, sales success, and honest, ethical commerce than deals with most of the small publishers crowding the very wild-west world of small presses, publishing mills, vanity presses, and outright grifters. No offense to any of you small publishers doing it right; but you know you’re surrounded by shysters and sharks trying to look just like you.
But wait! That’s not all! There’s more!
I’ve also decided to simultaneously publish a collection of my short stories titled Disposable Girl & Other Tales of Brutality and Wonder. More on that in another post.
This might wind up being the greatest double launch since Cormac McCarthy’s publication of The Passenger and Stella Maris in 2022, or Bruce Springsteen’s release of Human Touch and Lucky Town in 1992, or the births of football’s Ronde Barber and Tiki Barber in 1975, or even the United States’ admissions of North and South Dakotas in 1889.
Double your pleasure, double your fun. Right?
