Pocket Hole is available

Buy Pocket Hole in paperback here through CreateSpace or on Kindle or paperback here through Amazon.

If you want a little backstory on this, uh . . . story, read on.

+Alex Bell is a friend of mine as well as a talented artist. The cover art for Pocket Hole is his. A few years ago we decided to create a graphic novel and used my novel Boo Noon for the adaptation. Boo Noon is a book, not a huge one, but still big enough that it was a challenge. Boo Noon the graphic novel was going to be really big, and we spent hundreds of hours working on the story and creating thumbnails. We re-imagined the first few chapters at least three times. Each re-imagining was amazing and did really cool things, but in the end it was too big a project.

One night, after a frustrating session, Alex called me on the phone (I think he was in his car driving home) and said that we just weren't going to get this done. We'd bitten off more than we could chew. A year-and-a-half of work wasn't going to see life.

He was right, but that didn't make it any easier. I was pretty bummed for a few minutes, but I had seen this coming. The story was just too big for two people with full-time jobs and actual lives to complete. So what we needed was a smaller story. I decided not to dwell on what wouldn't happen and thought hard that night before I went to bed about coming up with a smaller story. When I awoke the next morning, Pocket Hole was there in my mind. I hurried and wrote down all the highlights, but most everything was there.

I called Alex on the phone that day, pitched the idea, and we changed directions.

Now by me saying that the whole story was there in my mind, I don't mean to infer that what I wrote down that morning didn't change. There were lots and lots of things that Alex and I came up with as we worked on the story, great bits that fleshed out characters, lots of humor and sight gags, and even crucial plot points. The story is as much Alex's as mine.

So our goal was to attend ComicCon in San Diego in 2010, Pocket Hole in hand. After almost killing ourselves for six months we had the first issue, which covered maybe 2/5s of the story. Pocket Hole, Issue 1, was really good and we were proud of it. We went to ComicCon with high expectations, and while we had a good time, sales were less than spectacular. We were both a little deflated.

Another roadblock. This one lasted for a while. Alex and I worked on projects here and there, but Pocket Hole, Issue 2, didn't happen and it appeared it never would. We had a couple other starts and stops on other projects, but that was it. Life gets busy. Alex and I are still close friends, but the attached-at-the-hip project work doesn't happen anymore.

I love writing novels, so I wrote Alone With You Somehow and put together Six Christmas Stories, and then I thought about Pocket Hole. It was a complete story. The darn thing was thumbnailed to the end, why not adapt it to a book? Alex and I had attempted the same thing with Boo Noon but in reverse. Seemed like a good idea.

Writing Pocket Hole ended up being one of the easiest things I've done.

So, if you've read this much, I would expect you are interested enough that you picked up a copy. I hope you like it. I really think you will. It contains the best efforts of a really talented artist/storyteller and a marginally talented storyteller. Together, I think Pocket Hole turned out pretty exceptional. Let me know what you think. I welcome feedback.