Caffeine and Catnip

Madison Moss thought inheriting her aunt’s cozy coffee shop would mean a quiet life in Happy Valley. Instead, she’s juggling enchanted espresso machines, a talking cat with attitude, and a winged sprite whose caffeine habit should probably be illegal.

But when strange magic starts seeping into town, Madison finds herself tangled in family secrets, forgotten wards, and a brewing threat that could swallow Happy Valley whole.

Armed with a stubborn streak, a frothy latte, and a few unexpected allies, Madison will have to decide how far she’s willing to go to protect her café… and the magic that comes with it.

Song of the Summer Jazzman

Wilson Patch, a conventional upper-middle-class man from New Jersey, changed in college. He developed an ill-conceived dream of moving to California, living on the beach, and never owning an alarm clock. His dream gradually evaporates as forces he cannot control draw him back to New Jersey and New York City.

Along the way, he meets Lisa, Slade, and Grace, all of whom figure prominently in the novel. Wilson’s life gravitates eventually from fantasy back into reality.

He eventually travels to California, but via airliner on a business trip. This is about the disintegration of Wilson’s dream.

Mirrored Images

Deep resonance of a shared experience often defines the human condition. Recognizing reflections of ourselves in others is a common trait that unites humanity. The phrase ‘I can relate’ is often uttered when we encounter others going through similar events, helping us to better understand and empathize with our fellow human beings.

Mirrored Images: Reflections of the Human Tribe explores this very concept of resonance. This book is a collection of poetry and prose that encapsulates the essence of the 21st century era. The perplexity, love, and nature experienced by individuals are woven throughout these pages. The spirit is expressed in each piece, offering a reflection of oneself and a reflection of others worldwide, emphasizing the commonalities that bind all humans together.

The chapters delve into topics such as nature, life, fear, humanity, spirit, love, and cultural verse and essays. These chapters will leave the reader craving more. The collection, written over a decade, draws inspiration from various experiences to create its captivating content. It reflects the human tribe – the challenges we face, the lives we lead, and the forces that shape our daily existence.

Mirrored Images takes you on a journey, seamlessly integrating poetry and prose into a compelling narrative from cover to cover. This collection is sure to enlighten and inspire, offering an enjoyable and thought-provoking reading experience that will resonate with readers from all walks of life.

Cliff Dwellers and Careless Divers

THE FEATHERED EDGE

Inner fence

was beyond mending

every animal in the barnyard

went a different way.

Completely connected

but mostly confused

he put the cutters in reverse;

his soul a restless farmer

condemned to farming,

farmed no more.

Weatherman’s poetry is about a poet finding himself. It moves from a romanticization of a past life in Montana, trips to Alaska, and finally to Canada, where he would start a family. His poetry moves toward a mystical detachment from a troubled society and marriage, where his poetry becomes a personal refuge. Finally, he realizes the power of authenticity in our own voice, that we have always had each other, and that the only power we lose is the power we give away.

Call Me Karma

There are threads that keep us tethered to this world; there are rules and beliefs that play us all for fools. Call Me Karma follows the journey of learning that fate pulls strings for no one. That Lady Justice sees every rise and fall, and that perhaps we were selfish for assuming she ever served us at all.

Grief, love, denial, reflection—there is balance to nature; for every sin on the scale there sits a virtue on the other side. The roadmap of life rarely follows a steady path; not every success is permanent, and not every failure is damning. There is a strength in accepting these simple human truths and in understanding that some stories call for a bittersweet ending. These poems are yours to embrace or despise, to comfort those they reach, or to patiently wait on the bottom shelf until the right time.

The Devil's Grapevine

A young woman in the late 1930s became the mother of an illegitimate child. She was living in a small, pious town, which was very judgemental. The conception of her child was by an infamous rapist. Interpol had been chasing him across three continents. There had been hundreds of rapes. His crimes made headlines around the world, and he was soon captured, sentenced to death, and electrocuted. Only the girl, her mother, and the authorities were aware of who impregnated her.

When the boy was three, she and her mother decided she must become anonymous for fear that Roddy may find out that the blood of this monster runs through his veins. Changing her name, she and Roddy leave the past behind and end up in California.

Roddy, now ten, ends up working in an out-of-the-way truck stop in Grapevine Village. Many adventures and complexities lay before them. Love, death, a boy’s fantasies, the FBI. and warring trucking companies transporting Mexican farm workers without proper papers, who are fighting over who controls the rights to use the highway called “The Devil’s Grapevine.”

Roddy and his mother are caught between the FBI and the warring truckers, which ends in a gunfight that ends up burning much of the village to cinders. All works out in the end with the mother, the son, and a truck driver who rescues them from the gunfire and flames.

The Complainer's Blood

A flea complains about the quality of the blood she drains. A man believes his saliva sanctifies ice cream. A woman drives past suffering in an air-conditioned SUV while dreaming she is the one who suffers. A predator quotes scripture as his hands do their damage.

These stories don’t ask you to witness horror from a safe distance. They ask what it means that the distance was never safe to begin with—that you’ve been participating all along.

Written from positions of uncomfortable intimacy—parasites on skin, insects behind walls, children beside cooling bodies—The Complainer’s Blood occupies the space between observer and accomplice.

The question isn’t whether you’ll look away. It’s whether you’ll recognize what you’re looking away from.

Mirror Never Lies

Mirror Never Lies is not a memoir that explains. It reveals. Through intimate reflections and sharply observed emotional truths, this book invites the reader into the private space where identity is negotiated, desire is examined, and survival quietly rewires the soul. It is about the versions of ourselves we build to be loved, the masks we polish to be safe, and the cost of carrying them for too long. So, tune in to see this first-generation immigrant gay story.

Written with restraint, precision, and unexpected tenderness, Mirror Never Lies resists easy answers and performative healing. Instead, it lingers in the in-between: the pause before honesty, the ache beneath success, and the moment you realize you’ve outgrown the life that once protected you. These pages explore ambition and loneliness, intimacy and control, and memory and reinvention—without nostalgia and without apology.

Long Green

This book is about a New Yorker, Kob Hansen, whose parents were both born in Kentucky, though he had only visited as a child with his grandmother to bury them both after a tragic murder suicide. Yet, while teaching part-time at Columbia, he falls for a graduate student who is from Kentucky. They fall in love and decide to get married, and she talks him into returning to her hometown for the wedding and to live. There, things go awry as he learns about his own family and hers—his family poor Norwegian miners while hers rich Bluegrass elite.Meanwhile, Kob encounters a man known simply as Long Green, an old hermit who did twenty years for murder who, after his release, is shunned by the people of the county. The man he murdered thirty years before, Kob soon comes to believe to be his own grandfather, or so he thinks, until he begins to believe Long Green (Labe Cornett) may be his real grandfather.This changes his entire picture of his life and upbringing, all among the Southern culture and mindset of native Kentuckians.

Paper Roses and Paranormal Romance

He has been hiding for centuries. She has been hiding from herself.

Their worlds are about to collide.

William is no ordinary immortal. A hybrid vampire-djinn, he possesses all the power of both lineages and none of their weaknesses. Hunted, feared, and endlessly reinventing himself, he moves through the world behind carefully crafted illusions. But beneath every facade is the truth he has never dared to share.

Cici has survived the unthinkable: a devastating accident, a shattered engagement, and the abandonment of almost everyone she trusted. After eighteen months tucked away in the safety of a psychiatric institution, she’s terrified to begin again… until a stranger with swagger, charm, and entrancing emerald eyes steps into her life.

Their connection is immediate. Their loneliness, mirrored. Their fate is inevitable.

An intoxicating blend of romance, danger, and supernatural intrigue where nothing is as it seems

… especially the man telling the story.

The Year of the Cat

Due to COVID-19, Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt Webster and his partner, Alfred ‘Stinky’ Floyd, are about to lose their business, Pine Valley Outfitters.

It seems a miracle when Ruben Benjamin Kaufman, president of On Site Films, offers Teddy a job. Somehow, Kaufman has obtained a rare permit to film in the Pine Valley Wilderness. Since no combustion vehicles are allowed, Teddy’s job is to transport (by horse) film equipment, technicians, and actors onto the mountain and keep them supplied. Stinky (who loves garlic and smells of it) will be the camp host, babysitter, and trash cop.

Unfortunately, trouble, like snow in the high country, comes early. Tony Pisano, Kaufman’s scene scout, is found torn to shreds, apparently the work of Puma concolor—the great North American cougar! Death by cougar is confirmed when its DNA is found in morsels of deer meat embedded in Pisano’s body. The head-scratcher: Why would a cougar, who’d just feasted on a deer, kill again? And so soon?

Sadly, this is not the end of Teddy’s troubles. When Katrina ‘Kat’ Kasey (the female star) wanders off, she also ends up on the medical examiner’s table.

The mystery deepens when the cougar’s DNA is found to match the DNA of Teddy’s (orphaned and rescued) 10-month-old cougar cubs. Caged in Teddy’s backyard, waiting to be released into the wild, they have never been anywhere near the Pine Valley Wilderness. Clearly, something is not kosher here. How could DNA from Teddy’s ‘kittens’ end up on the bodies of two corpses? And equally puzzling, why?