🔥 THE CASE IS WIDE OPEN 🔥 shamus-sherlock-holmes-cover 🔥 One of Holmes' greatest challenges has arrived. 🔥 The curtain rises. The fog clears.And the truth steps out of the shadows. Before Holmes stepped on the scene, Ira Aldridge brought Shakespeare to life. His daughters, Luranah and Amanda, carried his legacy — and faced the world’s shadows. In this powerful new mystery, fact and fiction collide. 🕯️ I wrote Sherlock Holmes and the Hands of Othello to honor forgotten legacies and ask:What if...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
shamus-sherlock-holmes-cover 📣 Greetings, fellow lovers of fiction — and mystery in particular! 🔍 Edited Monograph: Why Sherlock? Why would a poor Black boy love Sherlock Holmes? What was the appeal? Why mystery? Why admire a man who stood beside — and sometimes behind — the great colonizers of human history? After all, Watson was a medical doctor and a soldier in Afghanistan.England had invaded the Middle East, India, Africa, and lord knows where else. But Holmes…He was a loner.An odd man...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Welcome to my newsletter! "Ever noticed how easy it is to recall your mistakes?" Hey Reader. More often than not, I can remember my mine.I can remember them clearly… or as a muddled mess of unpleasant emotional recollections. I remember people shouting at me.I remember feeling stupid after making a simple mistake.I remember people turning down my work.Not getting anyone to even look at it.Not being able to sell it. And yes, I remember the times my work sold, was published, and was...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Welcome to my newsletter! "Jamal had no sense of his body. He couldn’t stretch out his hand before his face. If he still had one." Sit back, Reader. There's more. "Flash. Another impact, somehow inside him, around him, a part of him. Another hit. This time it entered him, possessed him. A sudden rush of warmth, anger, fear, innocence, electric, exploding “You’re the one who wanted to adopt . . .” A fragmented memory, harsh, isolated, deeply personal, painful -- but not his own. The stream of...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Welcome to my newsletter! "Good Still Matters — And So Do the Stories We Tell" Hey there, Reader, I’m not sure how this will work out—so think of this as a stream-of-consciousness experiment. Back in middle school, I had two good buddies—let’s call them Jamal and Jose. We bonded over comic books, action movies, and even made our own homemade good-guy vs. bad-guy films. They looked great in costumes; I was the overweight kid who usually played the villain. But we didn’t mind—because back then,...
2 months ago • 1 min read
Welcome to my newsletter! “What you write filters through who you are.” Reader, did you know ... I'm a person who was raised by a single parent — my mother — with regular visits to my grandmother and grandfather. However, many of the dominant role models I admired were fictional characters from television, films, books, and comics. One might assume that I learned the naïve lessons — that good always triumphs over evil, that being kind and generous leads to a loving and peaceful life, or that...
2 months ago • 1 min read
Welcome to my newsletter! “Two people, one terrible secret, and the pressure to reveal it before dawn.” Hey, Reader, Can you handle the heat? I've previously discussed Story Structure and the benefits of using Writing Prompts. Today, we’re going to use both. Here's a challenge for you: I’ll give you a framework for starting, developing, and finishing your story. The framework will be for a Microfiction (300 words or less) or Flash Fiction (500 -1000 words) tale. Here’s the prompt: Two people...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Welcome to my newsletter! "So Many Stories To Tell" You know, Reader, It's funny how I realize that in my effort always to offer some value and keep my focus on serving you, my readers, students, and clients, I tend not to promote the other things that I do. Or at least not to promote them too often. It's not a good business head, but it is the head of an artist still recovering from Lone Ranger syndrome. I’ll explain that some other time. So I'm going to take this opportunity to steer you...
4 months ago • 1 min read
Welcome to my newsletter! "What Is Our Greatest Creative Challenge?" Reader, Did you know ... The same things that fuel writers and other creatives can often be the roadblocks we can't seem to get past. The thing that trips us up. The fear that freezes us creatively like the proverbial deer in the headlights. Sometimes, our greatest challenge isn't which story to write, what character is not gelling consistently, or what conflict doesn't feel as suspenseful or tension-driven as we might need...
4 months ago • 1 min read