From the Farm

By the time I finished my fourth draft of Accidental Shepherd, the manuscript had soared to 154,000 words, a stratosphere reserved for the likes of Herman Melville, Barbara Kingsolver, and Karl Ove Knausgård. The odds of a literary agent or publisher even glancing at such a tome by a little-known author like me were vanishingly small.

Thus began a long and excruciating exercise of killing my darlings, slashing out uncountable sentences, paragraphs and even the occasional chapter, until the word count slipped below 100,000.

But now I’ve got a website … and the freedom to post whatever I like. So if you’re interested in reading more about Hovland and Norway, take a peek at this page from time to time to see what more I’ve added.

The Stories

Journey to Norway: Part 1

By far the longest section of text that I slashed out of my manuscript was the tale of my six-week trip from San Francisco to my final destination in Norway, …