‘Firefly’ Gets Honored

My youngest daughter—Year of the Firefly—just received an Honorable Mention in the Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards. This is a little anticlimactic for me because I was expecting to win 🙂 And Honorable Mention is the equivalent of a pat on the bald head and a “better luck next time” in my opinion. Maybe the judges are looking down their long, literary noses at me because I am an incarcerated writer. Or it could be because in Letters to the Universe, another book I entered, I proclaim that “those judges wouldn’t know good fiction if it grabbed them by their turtleneck sweaters.” I still believe that. Even though On the Shoulders of Giants got first place in 2020, and way back in 2015 With Arms Unbound earned me my first Honorable Mention. It’s all good. I don’t need a judge to validate my life’s work. Old and new readers do that every day. On both sides of the razor wire. (Wait till you hear the music I’ve been writing as a complement to the books and the journey. I can’t wait to play the musical score to my own audiobooks.) One interesting thing about Year of the Firefly is that it accurately predicts January 6^th, 2021. Even though the story is about a young pregnant UWF student in jail. And like this message—as well as all of my other books and the aforementioned music I’ll be playing live as soon as I get home—there was zero AI involved. Wishing you momentum.

Introduction from ‘Prose for Cons’

Coming 2026…

Here at the checkered flag of this decades-long prison sentence, I figure it’s time to pay homage to the craft that saved my life…

* * *

“Why even bother?” you may be asking. Good question. I ask myself the same thing all the time. I write because I have to write. Because the empty half-life of the yard and its parlay tickets and its dope and hard looks and gangs and stabbings is the same at every prison. Because writing gives me an identity other than failure-loser-criminal. Because I’m growing old in this shithole and I’ll never have a child of my own. This book is my legacy, proof that once upon a time, a kid named Izzy James wandered the earth. Prose for Cons says everybody has a story in them. This is mine. —On the Shoulders of Giants, 2016

I remember exactly where I was when I scribbled the above words into my notebook—the year, the prison, the unit I was living in, the faces in the surrounding bunks. I remember the uncertainty too. That old familiar self-doubt. Beginning a book can feel like staring up the face of Everest for me. I was unsure where or how to begin, unsure if I was even capable of writing a novel. This, despite the fact that I had already written two at the time. It’s something I’ve come to know intimately over the years, this low-grade anxiety—Who do you think you are, writing a book? You didn’t even finish high school. You’re an uneducated prisoner. Nobody wants to read that shit—all the way up until the moment the pen hits the page. Then, almost magically, the fear and self-doubt begin to fade. It may take a few sentences. It may even take a few paragraphs. But inevitably, the characters and narrative forces take over and the law of momentum kicks in. I am a conduit. The story moves through me.

This is precisely what happened with Giants, just as it did with all the other books I’ve written in various correctional institutions over the last fifteen years. I can feel it happening even now, in real time, as I write these words. Momentum. What a beautiful and exhilarating thing to experience. We’ll cover it more extensively in Chapter Eight. But it would be criminally negligent of me not to acknowledge it here, in the opening paragraphs of this book, considering the profound impact it has had on my life.

If you’ve read On the Shoulders of Giants, you may remember the craft manual that Izzy received as a gift from a teacher at the notorious Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys. It was a book that resurfaced on a dusty prison library shelf when he was a few years into a life sentence almost a decade later. A book that shaped him as a writer. I think most aspiring authors have probably stumbled upon a few of these in our noble pursuits of unlocking the Great American Novel within. I definitely have—and I’ll list some of those pivotal influences in Chapter Nine—but craft manuals (including this one) are similar to restaurant menus . . . sooner or later we need to eat the food.

When I was writing Giants, I kept envisioning a young person in a set of circumstances similar to my own—serving a long prison sentence, disgusted with the colossal mess he had made of his life, seeking an identity other than “failure-loser-career criminal.” Maybe he’s attempting to navigate the yard politics of race and gang culture or dealing with PTSD from the unrelenting violence or battling addiction . . . maybe he’s in solitary confinement when he comes across the book. But as he toggles between the alternating first and third person viewpoints of Izzy and Pharaoh and absorbs the subtle and not so subtle lessons on things like dialogue, irony, and the art of the twist; I wanted him to come away feeling empowered and inspired. To not just think it was an awesome book when he turned the final page, but to say to himself, “I think I can write a novel!”

I have no idea whether this has ever happened. I hope so. What has happened is a steady stream of kites, emails, comments, and letters from recently released prisoners—male and female—saying, “Dude, you wrote my life.” Supreme compliment by the way. Massive return on energy. The other thing that happens is, every once in a while, someone will complain about not being able to find Prose for Cons on Amazon. “It’s the book you quote in On the Shoulders of Giants, the one with all the rules for writing, the one that Izzy learned from . . .” The interesting thing about this book within the book they are referring to is that it was just a plot device, a means of conveying information. Prose for Cons did not exist . . . until now.

I’ve actually been meaning to write it into existence for years. But there was always the next fiction project tugging on my sleeve. Now, here at the checkered flag of this decades-long prison sentence, with eight books on the shelf and the next chapter of my life awaiting on the other side of the razor wire, I figure it’s time to pay homage to the craft that saved my life.

While this is fundamentally a how-to manual that explores the discipline of writing, it is also a love letter to the pursuit of mastery. And although the intended audience is the incarcerated scribe, a criminal record is not mandatory. This book is for anyone who feels a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo. And it offers the tools—both mechanical and philosophical—to alter the trajectory of your story arc and embark on your very own hero’s journey. All via the power of the written word.

But be forewarned. This is not a book of shortcuts. You will find no cheat codes or life hacks in the following pages. This is not a get-rich-quick scheme. Not for you and certainly not for me. I’ve been pouring my soul into these books for fifteen years and have yet to see International Bestseller emblazoned across a single cover. This may never happen. Or it could happen tomorrow. But what I’ve gained in the process is more valuable than paper currency or fleeting notoriety. So if you’re committed to doing the work, for the work’s sake, turn the page. As the legendary Steven Pressfield would say, “Your unlived life awaits.”

The Artificial Machine

I was in the Federal Detention Center in Oklahoma City for a couple weeks last month. Flying Con Air from a Central Florida prison to another gated community in Indiana. Hopefully my last time ever traveling with the feds. Miserable experience. Shackles, handcuffs, waist chain, black box. Impossible to eat, or scratch my ear, or blow my nose . . . But while in the holding cell, I overheard two young men discussing books.

“Man, that thing said ‘Sensational New York Times Bestseller’ and it was garbage!” one said. “I need to write a book.”

“It’s easy now,” his homeboy answered. “Between AI and talk-to-text, the books write themselves. All you gotta do is feed it an idea, pay somebody to design a badass cover, and then pump it on social media. Once it goes viral, you already know—instant millions.”

No shit. Instant millions? Who knew? 🙂

I really wanted to interject that I’ve been writing novels since 2011. Novels with badass covers and intricate plots, stories full of conflict and tension that I’ve poured my heart and soul into, plotlines that AI could never invent. Books that I’ve been pumping on social media since Obama was president. And so far . . . No millions. Instant or otherwise.

I used to fear AI. I even wrote about it in Letters to the Universe. Check out this excerpt:

Which leads me to this memoir, if that’s what this is, this collection of essays written over the last nine years at five different prisons. Hybrid memoir? It almost feels pretentious to be writing this at all. Like an unknown band putting out a greatest hits album. I guess in some ways I’m attempting to write my future into existence, that oak and acorn thing again. But with the tectonic plates of time shifting, and the great and terrible Artificial Intelligence cresting in the cosmos and on the verge of crashing into our planet like some digital tsunami, it’s beginning to feel like now or never. Pretty soon AI will be producing works that rival the masterpieces of men like David Foster Wallace and David Mitchell in a fraction of the time. The market will be flooded with synthetic brilliance and creativity. This is bad for established authors, but it’s horrible for unknown writers like myself.

Or is it?

Maybe there will be a backlash, a rage against the artificial machine. Maybe a pro-human movement will kick up like the Buy American response to all the outsourcing and offshoring of the early 2000s and usher in a new era. Maybe in this brave new world of computer-generated storytelling, the author’s backstory will inch to the forefront, and the story behind the stories will lend an authenticity to the overall reading experience. To cop David Mitchell yet again in this little rambling soliloquy, “Such elegant certainties comfort me at this quiet hour.”

But today, 1000 miles from home, 20 years and 8 books into this prison sentence, my mind keeps going back to those two young men in that Oklahoma holding cell. They were really just trying to figure out a route to get rich quick. A shortcut. That’s the American way, right? Can’t fault them for that. But is it really the American way? Nah. Maybe the American dream. Maybe . . . But upon further review, I think the American way is about hard work and sacrifice. Showing up every day, grinding through adversity, refusing to give up. If I would have known back when I first started writing Consider the Dragonfly that I would go on to produce 8 books while in prison and none of them would be bestsellers, I might’ve dropped my pen then and there.

What a colossal mistake that would have been.

Had I quit, or chased some shortcut by outsourcing all the work to a computer program in the pursuit of instant millions, I would have missed my blessing. I would have missed the transformational journey of all those hours logged, all those years of sweat and solitude, all that time spent writhing on the cell floor in search of the perfect word, hunting it like a piece of crack. Soul-sculpting, character-building years. And I would have missed the unparalleled exhilaration of writing “The End” on the final page of a long project, of slaying that dragon, of standing over it and growling “Rest in peace motherfucker” as Steven Pressfield says in his magisterial War of Art . . . then immediately starting the next one. AI could never replicate that.

The work is its own reward.

—November 18, 2024

Letters to the Universe

I was pissed when Colson Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for his best-selling novel, The Nickel Boys. I remember listening to his interview on NPR’s Fresh Air while quarantined in a prison on the Florida Panhandle during the height of Covid, feeling the way an overzealous sports dad must feel when someone else’s kid wins the MVP. His critically acclaimed novel—and second Pulitzer—was set against the backdrop of the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, a subject I explored four years earlier in a book I consider to be my life’s work, On the Shoulders of Giants.

There was something intrusive about this darling of the New York literati writing about incarcerated youth in Florida. Like a rival gang member who wandered onto the wrong side of the yard (or a Walmart going up across the street from a local independent grocer). The thing that really grinded my gears was that Dude never even bothered to come down here to tour the cottages or the unmarked graves or the infamous White House.

Of course, I was being irrational, not to mention hypocritical and territorial. Fiction writing, the best of it, turns on imagination and empathy and research. Did it matter that he wasn’t from the Sunshine State? Or that he had never spent time in a facility like Dozier? Hadn’t I written essays slamming cancel culture for attempted takedowns of other authors for similar transgressions? Half of my beloved Giants is written in the point of view of Pharaoh Sinclair, a young black man from the Azalea Arms housing project. To my knowledge, Colson Whitehead has never written an op-ed accusing me of cultural appropriation.

I didn’t care about any of that at the time. I just wanted some love for my book. And aside from my state-raised brothers and sisters and a handful of Facebook friends, my Pillars of the Earth, my Led Zeppelin IV, my David was toiling away in obscurity, unnoticed and unread. I think I even sent Terry Gross a copy at WHYY in Philadelphia. No response. Such is life for a self-published and incarcerated author. (Sidenote: The following year, Giants did win first place in the Mainstream/Literary Fiction category of the Writer’s Digest Self-Published book awards. A longtime goal and major milestone in my world. But let’s be real—there’s an Everest of altitude between a WDSPBA and a Pulitzer.)

In fairness, I can’t say that Mr. Whitehead is undeserving of the accolades since I’ve never read his work. I plan to though. Some of the best novels I’ve read over these last 18 years in prison were Pulitzers—Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See… Maybe The Nickel Boys will be an upcoming Astral Pipeline Book Club selection. We’ll see if it can stand shoulder to shoulder with these modern classics.

But as I was thumbing through my almanac looking at the various awards for writing—the Pulitzer, the Nobel, the Man Booker—a phrase winked up at me from the page. It was in the National Book Award section. In the fine print below the heading were the words Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Letters… Shonda would call this a breadcrumb. A little something from the Universe to let me know I’m on the right path. I thought I was the only one who referred to my novels and essays as letters. Apparently, this was a thing long before I wrote the first words of Consider the Dragonfly. Like centuries before. One of the definitions of letters in the Oxford Dictionary is “literature.” The irony here is that my writing style—if I have a writing style—was cultivated and refined over decades of writing actual letters. Hundreds of them. Letters dating all the way back to the Dade Juvenile Detention Center in 1987; many to strangers, mostly unanswered. Until one day when I decided to write the world a letter in the form of a book.

Hard to believe I’m now on the verge of releasing number seven, a hybrid memoir and essay collection that spans the final nine years of a twenty-year mandatory prison sentence, an era in which I learned to conquer my demons through the redemptive power of writing. Is it Pulitzer caliber? Probably not. But it’s a massive accomplishment in my little corner of captivity, a bookend to a fantastic journey, the best I could do between the years of 2014–2023.

Letters to the Universe, available this Fall from Astral Pipeline Books.