I’ve posted the first of several novels I’ve written over the years and then ignored, allowing them to languish on my hard drive while I am distracted by a bumble bee. This is writing I did mainly for me, without a whole lot of consideration for market factors or wondering who the audience for the work might be. I presume the audience for the work is anybody reading this website, and, at a buck ninety-nine, how much of a risk could it possibly be?

I’ve found the only way to break writer’s block is to write, which seems self-defeating because, when you have writer’s block, writing is the very last thing you want to do. Since I couldn’t make any progress at all with the screenplay, I decided to write something else. I just started writing and kept writing, no matter how awful it was, until the ink began to flow from the pen once again. It took maybe a couple weeks of writing absolute gibberish before I finally managed to break through: I was a writer again, I was enjoying myself again. My writing exercise became the novel Zion.

The exercise yielded a love-hate story wrapped in a procedural crime drama. Much like the cancelled-before-it-ever-shipped Concrete Jungle: Legend of The Black Lion, Zion is a cynical urban fable about bad guys and worse guys. A world painted entirely in shades of gray, Zion is populated with quirky, complex, and deeply flawed characters in an overarching theme which deconstructs the meaning of love and the relevance of faith.

I’ve published it under the name “James Priest” to avoid further confusion with the British novelist Christopher Priest, whom I am quite certain has been driven insane from typing, “No, I don’t write Black Panther” thousands of times.

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Back when I was writing comics, I discovered, to my chagrin, that the letter “A”  looks exactly the same, regardless of who types it. Brilliant writers, hack writers, non-writers: the letter “A” looks precisely the same. I also discovered that people who lack this particular gift of expression also lack much respect for it. Respect, I’ve found, comes in two distinct flavors: (a) the phony respect we offer up to people who pay us and (b) the more difficult kind of respect we show for things that exist in a realm beyond our own ability to necessarily comprehend. I have enormous respect for, say, pro golfers and people who paint landscapes. I understand neither discipline. I can be walked out to the water’s edge, beyond which I will happily defer to the experts in these fields. When I fly to New York on business, for example, I usually let the pilot fly the plane. I don’t come up there into the cockpit and start flipping switches.

With writing, though, everybody can type the letter “A.” And, rather than me falling in love with my own words, it is usually the client who does that. Why? Because they are usually not professional writers. They sell hair spray and dental floss. Which is not to put down people who sell hair spray and dental floss but to point out there is a reason people hire professionals. Hiring a professional and then interfering with their efforts to make you richer than you already are is just stupid. I don’t understand people who continue walking past the water’s edge until their hat floats.

For more than two decades he has petitioned the governor and received a drawerful of legal forms and denials for his trouble. The Reverend Promise Y. Lee, Th.M., pastor and founder of the Relevant Word Christian Cultural Center in Colorado Springs, spent the formative years of his adolescence in general population at one of Colorado’s maximum security prisons. Pardoned: A Judicial Memoir is a true story of a 15-year old convicted of second-degree murder and left to fend for himself among hardened criminals and predators within America’s penal system. Written by my friend, Promise Lee, Pardoned is in development as an independent film project, and I’ve helped out with some early draft scripting.

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