Call me old-fashioned or just plain stubborn. 
      I’ve made my living as a journalist for the past thirty years in an industry everybody keeps insisting is in its death throes. And just for fun and my own sanity, I spend my other waking hours, working words into novels, that other mode that people keep saying is dead in our Internet Age. 
      I still believe in books as in physical folios of pages between covers, hard or soft, and not just pixels of an e-book on your new gadget from Amazon or Apple. I still believe in bookstores, independently owned, with their walls and shelves full of brand new books just beckoning to be opened and read. 
       It’s a great joy to have a new book to add to that stock of imagination that independent bookstores traffic in, and to go and meet like-minded people who love to read. 
      I’m excited that the book tour for “Half-Life of Home” is taking shape, thanks to my hard-working publicist Bridgette Lacy. We’ve lined up readings at a few independent bookstores across the state, and more are on the way. So mark these on your calendar and plan to come on out if you have a chance:

    Malaprop's, Asheville,  7 pm April 13
    City Lights, Sylva, 6:30 pm, April 19
    Accent on Books, 3 pm, April 27
    McIntyres, Pittsboro, 11 am May 4
   Blue Ridge Bookfest, Blue Ridge Community College, Flat Rock, May 18
    

        I spent most of the weekend with a new tripod, a mic and a stablizer for the iPhone that I checked out from work, practicing my video-making skills and spinning out my thoughts about the new book. We're making a bigger push as visual storytellers at the Asheville Citizen-Times and newspapers nationwide, trying to keep print journalism relevant in the world that Steve Jobs made with iPhones and iPads and other nifty devices. 
     The same pressures bearing down on the journalism industry are of course revealing cracks and crevasses in the publishing industry and how we buy and read books. 
     After you spend years and even decades on a piece of fiction, I still find it fun to go back and remember those first images that triggered that avalanche of words, the seemingly endless drafts, and the long round of edits to bring a book into the world.
     "The Half-Life of Home" makes its official debut on April 1, fittingly April Fool's Day. I won't say that writing a novel is a fool's errand in the 21st century with our culture's attention deficit disorder, but it helps to have a sense of humor and perspective.       I think that's why I was so ripe at age 15 when I discovered the novels of Thomas Wolfe, who wrote about "the buried life," what it was like to grow up in a provincial, hillbound town like Asheville, NC, about a century before Asheville became such a cool little burg for hipsters and the creative class. Wolfe knew something about breaking out of silence, even if it was charging headlong into overwritten purple patches at times in his novel.