West of Nowhere: How Failure Became the Fuel
My twenties were a dark time, man. I always felt like a failure.
Not because I wasn’t trying—but because every path I tried felt like a detour from who I wanted to be. My parents cared about getting me through college, and ideally it would be quick and inexpensive with a degree where I would emerge employable. My longtime girlfriend made it clear that “we” wouldn’t move forward until I graduated and could contribute equally—or maybe even take care of her. On paper, that all makes sense. In my bones, it made me feel like deadweight.
So I did what failures do: I flailed. I bounced from major to major, chasing something that would scratch the itch to create. Writer? Couldn’t make a living. Musician? Didn’t have the instrument. Film? Too far from California.
What I did have was a co-op job at a civil engineering firm and a dad who thought maybe engineering could be “creative enough.” The money was good. The path was clear. So I gave it a shot. But it never fit—not really.
I went to Texas A&M, family Aggie bloodline and all, and thought: if engineering can’t cut it, maybe architecture can. Architecture sounded like salvation. It was supposed to be art with a paycheck. Instead, it was endless nights of colored pencils on poster boards and the cruel joke that you had to keep a near-perfect GPA just to stay in the program. Spoiler: I didn’t.
So I meandered. And every step of the way, well-meaning people told me what I should do, what was “practical,” what was safe. But looking back, those voices were more distraction than guidance.
During those years, I carried notebooks. I wrote poetry I imagined turning into songs—some dark, some desperate, some flat-out about sex. I wrote prose too. A few pieces stuck, like shadows that never left me:
• The primeval forest—mice and small creatures scurrying under twisted roots, a stream cutting through the dark, wild natives camped along its banks, and beyond it all, a red desert stretching forever. That story still breathes somewhere inside me. You’ll probably see it in a book someday.
• The birds that fell from the sky—born from a Discovery Channel special, spun into a story about a depressed kid in the shower who wonders if he’ll even make it past 30. (Spoiler: I did.) Birds streak the sky, an old woman ranger shows up, and a young woman ranger he crushes on too. That idea grew, evolved, gutted itself, and eventually became something else entirely. You’ll hear more about it soon.
• And then there was the Quonset hut—a young man caught outside when nuclear war erupts, pulled back to Texas, and drafted into a brutal army. The hut itself was ripped straight from The Junction Boys, a book I picked up at A&M. Add in my Corps of Cadets flashbacks and the antagonism I lived firsthand–though less fervent and with less F bombs, and it was more than a story—it was a purge.
That last one became West of Nowhere.
It didn’t have a name when I first scribbled it down, but the bones were there: war, loss, survival, the Aether Gun, all stitched together from comics, video games, German opera, Lost, and my own lived scars. For years it was a mess of half-done ideas. In March of this year, I sat down, gutted it, curated it, and rebuilt it. And under my brilliant wife’s watchful eye, it transformed.
West of Nowhere isn’t the work of a kid chasing failure. It’s the work of a man who learned to alchemize failure into story, fear into fuel, shame into voice.
It is the first book in an epic modern western–a dystopian and post-apocalyptic saga and begins where civilization ends. While the science-fiction undertones pulse just beneath the surface, they ignite as the series unfolds.
For readers of Stephen King (The Dark Tower), Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men/The Road), and Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven), and fans of The Last of Us this story fuses post-collapse realism with slow-burning, otherworldly mystery—where love and vengeance walk the same road.
I’m proud of it. I hope you’ll read it. And I hope in some way you’ll see the same thing I finally see: that all the wandering wasn’t wasted. It was the long road west of nowhere, and it led me right here.
Pre-order West of Nowhere now from Death Do We Party Press or Amazon for release on October 21st.
#WestOfNowhere #DeathDoWePartyPress #Bookstagram #BookLaunch #WritersOfInstagram #AuthorLife #IndieAuthor #AmWriting #WritersJourney #BookTok #PostApocalypticFiction #ModernWestern #DystopianSaga #TexasFiction #TheLastOfUsVibes #DarkTowerFans #StationElevenFans #NoCountryForOldMen #SpeculativeFiction #SciFiWestern #BookLoversOfInstagram #ReadersOfInstagram #BookRecommendation #BookReels #FictionCommunity #Storyteller #CreativeJourney #WanderingNotWasted #FromFailureToFuel #ComingOctober21
