Writing
You are on my site, and maybe have read something I have written in the last week or so. But I have been writing for a while.
I have written just about every genre: nonfiction, memoir, an anthology, fiction…. Here is what I am currently working on and what I have written.
FICTION
The Misfit Hearts Series
The Misfit Hearts Series is about the kind of girls who make adults nervous and mixtape people feel seen. They haunt record stores, graveyards, punk shows, and the spaces between belonging and loneliness, discovering that faith, friendship, and grace often show up wearing scuffed Converse. Different isn't broken. It's where the story starts.
I have a publisher interested in the series, but nothing is signed or planned just yet. Hopefully soon. There are three books in this series, all reading like they could have been John Hughes films: Graveyard Girl, Record Shop Girl, and Punk Rock Girl. Hold tight while I find a good home for these girls…
Graveyard Girl
The people who look the most lost are sometimes the ones pointing everyone else home.
Lucy is new in town, dresses almost exclusively in black, and prefers a graveyard to a cafeteria. Naturally, people have opinions. Small towns are very good at opinions. They're less good at curiosity.
While classmates, parents, and church people try to figure out what category she belongs in, Lucy keeps quietly disrupting everyone's assumptions. The girl many see as dark may be the brightest person in the room.
Part Wednesday, part Pretty in Pink, Graveyard Girl is a story about grief, bullying, faith, second chances, and the strange possibility that understanding someone begins when we stop trying to explain them. It's also about church hurt, family wounds, unexpected friendships, and the stubborn hope that people can change. Sometimes the hardest thing isn't fitting in. It's allowing yourself to be known.
Record Shop Girl
Record Shop Girl is High Fidelity meets The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Pru trusts songs more than small talk and finds most of life's important answers somewhere between Side A and Side B.
The record shop is her sanctuary. Records make sense. People are harder.
When she discovers her grandmother's journal, what begins as a peek into the life of someone she thought she knew becomes something closer to a treasure hunt. The entries are filled with reflections on faith, beauty, music, doubt, and the sort of wisdom that sneaks up on you when you're not paying attention. Following her grandmother's words, Pru starts noticing that the world is stranger, deeper, and more alive than she'd realized.
Packed with records, friendship, family, first love, and spiritual wonder, Record Shop Girl is about the songs that shape us, the people who help us hear them, and the discovery that belonging has less to do with fitting in than finding those rare people who understand your favorite track before you've even explained why you love it.
Punk Rock Girl
Punk Rock Girl (in development, with writing beginning later this year) is Valley Girl for the misfit kids. And if the rebel got to be a girl instead of Nicolas Cage. Sheena is a punk rocker who prefers attending church through a laptop screen, where nobody stares at her eyeliner or asks awkward questions. Then she's dragged into a summer church book club and meets Cameron, a soccer player who seems to belong everywhere she doesn't.
What follows is a funny, awkward summer of romance, mixed signals, clashing friend groups, and two people discovering they're more than the labels they've carefully constructed. At its heart, it's a story about identity, belonging, and the possibility that God knows who we are better than any aesthetic ever could.
A Rocket & A Bomb
A Rocket and a Bomb is a novelized tribute to Michael Knott, a singular artist whose life oscillated between faith and failure, ascent and collapse. Blending fact and fiction, it follows Knott’s disruptive rise in Christian alternative music, his rejection of safety for honesty, and the volatile cycles of creation, addiction, loss, and reinvention that shaped his work. From noisy beginnings to institutional collisions, from collapse into quiet service and renewed faith, the novel traces endurance rather than triumph. Knott’s legacy emerges not as success, but as survival: art as prayer, weakness as fertile ground, and grace as something that persists through falling, rising, and staying.
The novel is done, but awaiting some permissions and affirmations from some of Mike’s friends and family.
NONFICTION
Songs and Prayers of The Message
In 2023, I disappeared down one of those rabbit holes that starts with a good idea and ends with hundreds of hours you can't quite explain to normal people. I created a kind of companion Psalter, pairing each Psalm from Eugene Peterson's The Message with selections from his books that echoed, expanded, or quietly conversed with that particular passage. Then, because apparently I don't know when to stop, I added songs, prayers, and reflections that stretched from Genesis to Revelation.
It became one of the most meaningful projects I've ever completed.
At one point, a literary agent told me, "I wish Eugene were still here to see this. He would have been honored by the care you've shown The Message and by your vision for extending its reach." Which is the sort of encouragement that can keep a writer going for months.
Unfortunately, inspiration is much easier than permissions. The project references material from more than three dozen books, and the process of securing rights turned out to be the publishing equivalent of assembling IKEA furniture without the instructions. Publishers understandably aren't eager to take on that kind of administrative marathon, so the project remains unreleased.
Which is a shame. I still think it could help people.
But for now, it's sitting on the shelf, waiting for a miracle, a benefactor, or someone who really enjoys paperwork. Mostly paperwork.
Puddles and Playlists (aka Hoppipolla)
My wife and I somehow ended up with the sort of love story that feels suspiciously like a Hallmark movie. You know the kind. If I pitched it in a meeting, someone would probably tell me to dial it back because it isn't realistic enough. One pastor's wife told me it's her favorite love story. Which is especially flattering because she has four children, and parents are contractually obligated to think their kids are the main characters.
Several years ago, I turned our story into a book and gave it to Sally for Christmas. Which sounds unbelievably romantic until you realize it mostly involved me staring at a laptop and second-guessing every sentence instead of actually spending time with the woman the story was about and for. Since then, a handful of publisher friends have encouraged me by saying, "This is a great story." The challenge, of course, is turning a great story into a great book. Those are not always the same thing.
Lately, I've been wondering if it wants to be a novel instead of a memoir. Memory is a funny thing. It leaves out details, rearranges conversations, and edits life like a distracted film director. Fiction gives you permission to chase emotional truth instead of just factual accuracy. So maybe that's where this story ends up. Or begins again. We'll see.
In the meantime, if you'd like occasional updates, false starts, breakthroughs, and other evidence that writing is rarely a straight line, sign up for the newsletter. You'll get news, sneak peeks, and whatever happens next. Which, if my life has taught me anything, will probably involve music, faith, unexpected detours, and a girl who was way out of my league saying yes anyway.
GLOW is the rare book on evangelism that started as a sermon series and somehow ended up becoming a book people actually wanted to keep reading. In fact, if I'm being honest, I still think it's a better sermon series than a book. Built from messages I've preached in churches from the Midwest to California, it explores a simple but challenging question: if Jesus expects all of us to share our faith, why does it feel so awkward so much of the time? Rather than offering scripts, strategies, or guilt trips, GLOW invites readers into a conversation about reflecting the Light of the World in everyday life. Many readers have told me it's the most authentic and organic book on evangelism they've encountered, which is encouraging because authenticity was the whole point.