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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