Horrible Harvest

If you’re new here, you’re probably wondering why this blog is called Horrible Harvest. The answer is that I was just a tad short sided. I wrote a book titled… You guessed it, Horrible Harvest. The journey to finishing that book happened here, on this blog. Essentially, I finished the final draft in realtime, in this space, almost daily. My work schedule and personal life sometimes prevented me from writing on certain days, but for the most part, I was here, at my laptop, rewriting a previous draft, and posting it here.

Why? Because writing Horrible Harvest has been a therapeutic slog that started in 2020. I needed to hold myself accountable in order to finish it. I was two and a half drafts in when I decided I needed a new voice and tone to keep going, and I needed a new platform, a public platform. I needed this blog. So, just after midnight on November 8, 2025, I posted the first reworked chapter here and 217,000 words later, on May 5, 2026, I posted the epilogue.

Believe it or not, the book is not about the pandemic, although you could legitimately call that experience a horrible harvest. This book is about bigotry and racism. I watched the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent BLM protests play out on television and social media, horrified to see people with my pigment and Southern background show up to counterprotest with Confederate flags in hand. It pissed me off because these idiots were completely oblivious to the fact that they themselves would have been without rights under the Confederacy’s system of plantation rule. They were protesting for their own subjection out of blind racism.

Augustus Tennyson and his journey from the son of a poor rice farmer to a disgraced veteran of the Confederate army became a germ of an idea that I turned into a unwieldy 370,000 tome that my agent refused to read because he said he couldn’t sell something that long. I’m forever appreciative that he rejected me because I was delusional, a state one sometimes reaches when they complete a book. I set the book aside for a month and then reread it for the 50,000th time. Not only was it way too long, it was poorly written. It was just a bloated-fucking-mess. Hence, the second draft. It was still bad, maybe even worse. I began the third version, and I just couldn’t do it. Not in the same voice. Not with the same characters. Something had to change. I had to change.

I came to this blog. Found the voice, and finished the book with 150,000 fewer words. My agent still says it’s too long, but he said that without reading it, so I’m going to move forward with it as it is presently written. If it doesn’t get published, it doesn’t get published.

I unpublished all the previous 174 posts. They are in draft mode, and they will remain unpublished for now. I can’t foresee any reason to make them live again, but who knows. It’s onto the next book, which I may or may not post here as I write it.