Greetings, and welcome to my little underground lair! It is truly an underground space, with not a single window for natural light. The only sun I can see is under the door at the top of the stairs, where the tiniest bit of golden daylight can be glimpsed if I stand in the right spot at the right time… though what is more often seen are the paws of Oliver the cat and Sophie the dog.

This space is not a large one, but it’s big enough to accommodate three separate areas for the three separate types of creative work I do here: the writing space, complete with two large bookcases filled with works that have inspired and influenced me over the years (as well as books for research, such as a slang dictionary and a textbook on anatomy and physiology); the craft table where I occasionally make abstract paintings (and occasionally even come up with something that isn’t horrid); and the little music studio at the back, where I make my noise.

The point of this newsletter is to let folks into this space, and to give them a look at what I do and, more importantly perhaps, why I do it. Maybe something I say here will prove helpful to you in your own creative work… or just life in general, who knows.

Future topics will likely include: the outdoors and the critters who live there (including, of course, snakes!); Art in general; Literature and Film; and probably even my little cancer journey. I’m a rambling sort of writer, so who knows what might get me scribbling.

You probably already know a bit about me, if you’re receiving this newsletter, but I feel I’d be remiss if I didn’t throw a little biography in here first. To whit:

I’m a novelist, first and foremost. I view the world through the lens of a writer of long-form fiction, and find comfort and meaning in the shaping of narrative materials and the painting of imagery through words. I was always this way, finding solace in the stories others told. I mean, this is true for all of us, but for me there was something deeper, something profound in the construction of narrative. I found in it a kind of magic which nothing else offered… not even music, which was always my second love. This magic both terrified and attracted me. It was as if stories were windows into places I wasn’t certain I was allowed to go… and yet I desperately wanted to enter and see what I could find there.

I was born in northern Wisconsin, and raised (such as it was) in Oconto, a small town about thirty minutes North of Green Bay. A simple child, the youngest of five. My father was a schoolteacher (biology) and football coach, and my mother was a nurse’s aid. It was my mother who shared with me a love of stories and music, and she who influenced me in my love of piano.

I was an average student in all grades… sometimes a below-average student. This remained the case until college, when I actually applied myself (it was possible!) and made the Dean’s List several semesters in a row. I was never scholastically inclined, though I was always interested in learning. I just was rarely interested in what they wanted me to learn, when they wanted me to learn it.

College was at UW-Oshkosh. I hated it a bit less than I hated high-school. My emphasis was Creative Writing, with a minor in Philosophy.

After college, in that somewhat desperate and uncertain state where the world looms wide open before you but you lack an understanding of how to truly enter it (and, in fact, may not wish to enter it at all after the lovely insularity of college life), I ended up moving to Milwaukee with my then-girlfriend (and now wife) Heidi. We barely knew each other, really, having been dating little more than a month, but she needed a roommate as she finished college and I needed to get the hell out of Oconto. I didn’t even hesitate when she asked if I wanted to go down and live with her. Milwaukee seemed like it might be full of potential and possibilities for a recent graduate with a goddamn English degree.

It wasn’t.

In between sending out resumes (these were paper and stamps days, kiddos), and making the occasional cold-call to local publishers of obscure books and magazines, I took odd little jobs. One was delivering the Milwaukee Journal, right before it became the Journal-Sentinel. My route took me into the wealthy neighborhoods East and North of the University. On early Sunday mornings, delivering the bloated Sunday edition in the quiet darkness, I would urinate on those well-maintained front yards. I’ve pissed on some of the best lawns in the state.

Eventually I ended up working for an asphalt company, doing quality control. I was stuck in this job for sixteen years.

During all of this time I was writing. I wrote longhand back then, and still have those notebooks. My first finished novel was written entirely in notebooks, until the very end, when I had bought my first computer. I remember finishing that novel on that final dark night, blasting out something like 10,000 words in a mad and excited rush to the end. That was 1996, I believe. It was after November, so I’d have been 26… I remember wanting to finish it while I was still 25, the age Orson Welles was when he made Citizen Kane. One learns early on to get used to disappointment.

I didn’t know what I was doing back then, writing-wise… and everything-wise, really. But I was doing it, and that seems to me to be most important thing of all. I wrote something like seven or eight novels before I found what the popular media likes to call my “voice.” What this really means is I found a way of writing that suited me… but there’s certainly no unifying voice between my works, I don’t believe. I consider those first novels apprentice works, of course, and whatever I was learning as I wrote them found its ultimate form in Dizzlemuck: Love in the Time of Wee Folk, my novel about Scottish wee folk invading small-town America. After that, I set about unlearning everything. The result of that was After the Death of the Ice Cream Man, which served as a kind of burning of everything I knew about narrative up to that point. From then on, I was on an adventure of experimentation and risk.

This is getting too long… here are some brief biographical details which may likely be expanded in future editions of this newsletter:

Heidi and I were married in Scotland in March of 2001.

I have a love of all critters great and small, with particular interest in reptiles and amphibians. This interest is more a poetic one than a scientific one, though I did help with scientific surveys once upon a time. Now I seek out these little friends for reasons I could never properly articulate, reasons those science-minded folks I worked for (those -ologists of various stripes) would never understand. I mean, I visit my rattlesnake friends for their advice on Life and Living, and not to measure snout-to-vent lengths. I’ve learned a lot from the scaled and crawly.

I discovered I had laryngeal cancer in 2023. After laser-surgery and radiation, all seems good. I recently hit the two-year post-radiation milestone, which amazes me.

I work as a bookmobile librarian, a job that, for our particular vehicle, requires a CDL (Commercial Driver’s License). I never thought I’d hold a CDL, since everyone I knew who had one back in my asphalt days was a thick-headed slob. Alas, life is strange.

I have ridiculously flat feet. And double-jointed thumbs. I still own the Star Wars toys I had as a kid (they’re right here in front of me as I write this). I once blew up a car in the middle of a frozen Green Bay (the body of water, mind you, not the city). I used to love beer… and still do, but now I only touch the NA variety. I love puppets, and own quite a few. I love puns. I love to annoy my wife with puns. I love my wife. I own a deer rifle but no ammunition. I own nunchucks, for some damn reason. The wife and I frequently go to the Milwaukee Symphony. I love donuts. I’m eating a donut as I write. I am one handshake away from Edward Abbey, and hence two handshakes away from Norman Mailer (and hence three handshakes from President Kennedy). I love camping. I love stars. I have had seven lovers in my life, three of which were one-night stands… no, wait, that’s Jenny Agutter in An American Werewolf in London… which is one of our favorite movies, by the way, and probably the one Heidi and I have watched more than any other.

Yeah, time to go now. I’m getting loopy. Until you next hear from me, take care and don’t take any shit from anyone.

Yours truly, madly, deeply,

TmC

Here are some links where you can buy my books, if you’re looking for hand-crafted fiction. Some of them touch on genre themes (werewolves, kaiju, little creatures!), whereas others are subtle and sensitive studies of life and death and family and everything in between.