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. If someone frames your work in a way you didn’t mean, I suppose different people seldom look at the same painting in the same way– so that’s a credit to the work’s depth, we would hope. But a colleague remarked 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 evade: “It took me thirty years to paint that.”  But maybe painting is mostly curiosity about time. And writing’s no different, sharing as it does so much of the painting process: get a strong intuition, throw some colors and shapes upon it, and then start working and reworking everything until so much back talk erupts that you have to stop. How long does that take?

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 ventured to sketch a narrative between them. The first protagonist to suggest a connection was a guy named Davy Halloran. Erased. Niall Noolan came along, but the original Niall, like fugitive color, came up weak of pigment. 

Few of my entrusted readers could get through the first iterations. 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.

The work required chain reaction rewrites made more intricate as the word count multiplied, and finally settled 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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