I didn’t plan on THE TAN GALAXY.

Seventeen years ago, I wrote a short piece published in Savannah Magazine. They headed it: The First Puddle of Color, or how a flat tire launched a life-long love affair with art. A friend said that he thought the article stood out, and that I should keep writing.

I wrote some short stories. I could not get them published. I kept writing.

If I’m asked how long it took me to paint a certain picture, I think: “It took me thirty years to paint that.” Turns out writing’s no different for me, with layers of insights piling up through time. I also find that writing shares much with the painting process: get a strong intuition, throw some colors and shapes upon it, and then start working and reworking everything until extra work doesn’t amount to extra progress.

In the meantime, I wondered if the short stories could relate to each other as different paintings might at a single exhibition. I lined them up and  sketched a narrative between them. The first protagonist to suggest a connection was a guy named Davy Halloran. Erased. Niall Noolan came along, but he was replaced by Davy O’Toole, who finally came around and adopted Niall’s name. 

Few of my early readers could get through the first drafts. One of them commented that a particularly cruel scene was unrealistic. Another quit reading when ‘the best character’ was written out. While I could flail around in the story’s defense, it wouldn’t matter: I’d lost my readers. Their responses were encouraging, though, because they did me the honor of honesty coming from careful attention.

Each rewrite multiplied the word count, and eventually developed into a multi-generational saga in five parts. The original short stories show up at various landing spots inside THE TAN GALAXY.   

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