Was it live or was it Memorex?

What a long strange summer it was giving up The Money Trail to be with a Southern belle in the small rural community where she grew up. The transition did not go well. I missed my sailboat so snuck into the Jonesville town pond with a swim noodle but the pond was full of snakes. I freaked. Bought a $200 kiddie pool from Big Lots. Got in, floated around and around into a full blown mother of all mid-life meltdowns. And from that wrote my first novel: Blue Rubber Pool. It was launched in 2018 by a small press as the publisher was losing her eyesight. I didn’t care. Didn’t think I’d be writing anymore. That whole summer is still a blur made even blurrier by Blue Rubber Pool. A boomer’s last gasp.

What happened next was a dizzying tail spin: Parents needing care, kids rebelling, a life changing car wreck. I went back to writing again. A second novel. Originally titled Birdwatching on Edisto but revised to The Bird in Your Heart when too many thought it was a field guide for birders and too many others couldn’t pronounce Edisto (EH-dis-tow). It’s about an Atlanta ad agency executive who divorces the boss’s daughter, loses his job, goes home to the sea island where he was raised, plans to sail off to see the world but his elderly mother is losing her eyesight and the big old house needs major repairs. A publisher had it in their maybe pile but took longer than I patience for so I self-published in 2023. Done.

Now what? A bit more writing left in me so I wrote two more novels. One’s under contract for publication in 2026. The other is still a work in progress.
But I’m ready to move on. Get back into the world. Back to work. Either what I did before or something new. Turns out my shelf life as a writer has an expiration date. Oh I’ll finish that last one and maybe turn to crafting a a few essays, poems, or short stories just to keep the brain’s gears humming. Perhaps but a bit more into marketing these books. When there’s four of them, I can justify the time and money. Creating promotional images, such as the one attached to this post, is great fun. Yes, I’ll enjoy doing more of that.

But I’ve been away from the world for too long. My car wreck injury is as healed as it’s going to be. I’m walking better, driving more.

And there’s something else out there waiting on me.

—Tim Bryant
Wrecked sailor. Author of Blue Rubber Pool and The Bird in Your Heart