James Bishop, Jr.

The Life and Legacy of Edward Abbey

I’m not sure who first alerted me to Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey’s meditation on his seasons as a park ranger at Arches National Monument near Moab in the 1950s, but whoever it was assured me that I’d love it.

They were right.

I did, and I’ve read it at least half a dozen times.

Edward Abbey, though, never thought it was one of his best works. In fact, he could get visibly annoyed when someone told him it was their favorite.

That’s just one of the revealing observations I came across while reading Epitaph for a Desert Anarchist: The Life and Legacy of Edward Abbey, by James Bishop, Jr., during a recent camping trip.

I’ve read a handful of Abbey’s books, including his best-known novels, The Monkey Wrench Gang and Hayduke Lives! But Bishop’s biography kept showing me an Abbey I didn’t know—or, more accurately, kept peeling back layers of the Abbey I thought I knew.

His first novel, Jonathan Troy, for instance, was written when Abbey was just 27. Two years later, he wrote The Brave Cowboy, which eventually became the film Lonely Are the Brave, starring Kirk Douglas. The movie apparently existed largely because Douglas, then under contract to a Hollywood studio, remembered a clause allowing him to make a “disapproved” picture as long as the budget remained under three million dollars.

The movie got made, and Douglas later considered it among his best performances.

It’s a great story. But what interested me as a writer was how many stories like this Bishop unearthed—and how, taken together, they gradually assemble a human being far more complicated than the desert anarchist of the book’s title.

Bishop starts with Abbey’s early life in Appalachia, where he was the eldest of five children. Strong-willed from the beginning, he once wailed at his mother while she was trying to wash his hair, “I’m a big man and don’t cry when I get my head washed.”

He was four at the time.

It’s a tiny anecdote, and on its own it doesn’t amount to much. But that’s one of the things Bishop does so well. He keeps dropping these little pieces into place. The stubborn four-year-old becomes the teenager who takes off across the country, who becomes the young man who attracts the attention of the FBI, who becomes the writer whose guiding principle is Resist much, obey little.

None of those things explains Edward Abbey by itself.

Together, they begin to.

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Abbey was shaped by his father, a logger, trapper, and farmer, and an anarchist as well. In the summer of ’44, with a year of high school still to come, he rode the rails and hitchhiked to Seattle, down the coast to San Francisco, then hopped a boxcar through northern Arizona and New Mexico. The brief summer shaped his life.

Bishop’s prose lights up the chapters that trace Abbey’s growing anarchism, his years in Utah and Arizona, his dealings with the U.S. government—the FBI opened a file on him when he was just 25—and his blossoming output as a writer.

Abbey took his motto from the writings of Walt Whitman: Resist much, obey little. Whitman was also an early inspiration. Edward’s father, Paul Revere Abbey, born with an inquiring mind and determined to be different, could recite every line of Whitman’s work by heart. One such passage stayed with Abbey his whole life:

Love the earth and the sun and the animals. Despise riches... hate tyrants...

Edward Abbey didn’t just go to the desert and become a writer focusing on ecology and the environment and the ruthless methods used to plunder the country by both private corporations and the government (in cahoots with the corporations). No, it came from his early years, and in particular from his father. Like his son, Paul hitchhiked west as a teenager and worked for a time in Montana as a cowhand. He saw such sorry working conditions nearly everywhere and realized they were not any better than in the mills and mines near where he grew up. Edward came by his contempt for the ruling class not only through his own experiences, but from the stories of his father.

Abbey was ultimately a contradiction. He never studied botany, zoology, or ecology, but he’s often called one of the leading nature writers of the century. And he resoundingly rejected the label of ‘naturalist.’

He was often dismissed as an angry, snide eco-nut. But he viewed the Southwest on a much deeper level. To him, it was sacred, holy, and the place of freedom.

He flailed at the myths of the Old West, which were built up by corporations and government agencies who saw the country only as a place to be developed, bought and sold, and the figures entered on the bottom line of a ledger.

And The Monkey Wrench Gang is full of exactly the sort of activities Abbey’s critics might have expected from him: wrecking machinery, pulling up survey stakes and otherwise sabotaging the machinery of development.

Did Abbey actually do any of that, or did he just write about it?

Depends on whom you ask.

Abbey himself admitted to pulling up survey stakes. And in a 1988 profile, Bill McKibben wrote that Abbey had gone out at night and put sand or sugar into the fuel tanks of earthmoving and mining equipment tearing up the desert.

But accusations are easier to find than proof. There’s little evidence that Abbey ever practiced anything approaching the more spectacular acts of sabotage carried out by his fictional characters.

So Abbey was a writer, an advocate for the Southwest, perhaps an occasional practitioner of monkey-wrenching—and certainly an inspiration to people who were willing to take the idea further.

There’s a story in Bishop’s book that seems to capture the philosophy particularly well.

A few years before Abbey’s death, a young couple on the Hopi Mesas spotted what Bishop describes simply as a “non-Indian truck” pumping water from a reservoir on the reservation. They reported it to the Hopi tribal council, which asked the people operating the truck to cease and desist.

They laughed and kept pumping.

The council went to court seeking an injunction, only to be told it could take two months for the case to be heard.

So one night, someone paid the truck a visit. Its tires were deflated and Karo syrup was poured into the engine crankcase. It took about six weeks to get the enormous vehicle repaired and pumping again.

A couple of days after it resumed, the injunction finally came through.

The pumping stopped.

It’s hard to imagine a better real-life illustration of the philosophy behind The Monkey Wrench Gang. The legal process had been followed. The tribal council had asked them to stop. The courts had been asked to intervene. But while everyone waited for the machinery of the law to grind forward, the machinery at the reservoir kept pumping.

So somebody stopped the machinery.

That was the moral territory Abbey liked to explore. When the institutions charged with protecting something fail to protect it—or simply move too slowly—is an individual justified in stepping outside those institutions to protect it himself?

Abbey’s fictional answer was rarely ambiguous.

Whether he always practiced what he preached is harder to determine.

And maybe that’s the part of Bishop’s book that has stuck with me most as a writer.

It would be easy enough to describe Edward Abbey. Anarchist. Environmentalist. Novelist. Provocateur. Defender of the American Southwest. A man suspicious of government, corporations, development and pretty much anyone who wanted to put another road through the desert.

But those are labels. They tell us what Abbey was. They don’t tell us how he became that person.

For that, Bishop gives us stories.

The four-year-old insisting that he’s a big man. The teenage Abbey hitchhiking and riding freight trains across the West. His father, who had made a similar journey and could recite Whitman by heart. The young man who attracted the attention of the FBI. The park ranger watching roads and tourists encroach on the wilderness he loved. The novelist who imagined Hayduke and his friends fighting back against the machines—and who may occasionally have done a little fighting back himself.

There’s no single moment when Edward Abbey becomes Edward Abbey.

And I think there’s a lesson in that for those of us who create people out of words.

We can tell readers that a character is stubborn. Or rebellious. Or angry. Or deeply in love with a place. We can invent the formative event that supposedly explains everything that follows.

Or we can do what Bishop does.

Give the reader the moments. Let them accumulate. Allow one detail to rub against another. Include the contradictions. Let the reader gradually discover the person rather than explaining the person to them.

Because real people are contradictory. Edward Abbey certainly was. And the more layers Bishop peels away, the less easily Abbey fits into any of the labels applied to him.

Which may be the point.

None of Bishop’s stories explains Edward Abbey by itself.

Together, they begin to.

And I suspect that when I pick up Desert Solitaire for the seventh time, I’ll find a somewhat different Edward Abbey waiting for me.

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“The best reggae band you’ll ever see.”

I’d already seen Bob Marley and the Wailers a couple of times, and a handful of other reggae acts, but for some reason Black Uhuru slipped through my ears’ grasp.

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I went to see them.

Stood up front at the old Starry Night in downtown Portland on Burnside.

Was blown away.

Started buying their albums. Anthem and Chill Out were on high rotation on my turntable for years. They still hit like a MF.

At one point, maybe the third or fourth time they came through town, I brought a couple of Black Uhuru albums and a ballpoint pen with me.

Left them in the car, parked just a couple of blocks away from the club. When the show was over, I ran to the car, grabbed the albums, went to the back door of the stage, and waited.

Nothing.

I don’t know how much time went by before I decided to head back to the car.

No autographs tonight, apparently.

As I wandered slowly up the street, I noticed a couple of the band members on the other side of the street. I followed for a few more blocks and watched them duck into a hotel. I went to the front of the hotel and waited, hoping that maybe another band member or two would show up. Can’t say for sure how long I waited – probably twenty minutes or so – when a woman came out and asked me if I was waiting for someone to sign the albums. I think she was their road manager.

“Yes, that’s right,” I said, or something like that. She took pity on me.

“Well, you waited this long, I might as well take you back.”

She escorted me to a few of the hotel rooms, where several band members signed the two LPs.

When she knocked on Sly Dunbar’s hotel room door, he peeked out, saw who it was, invited us in, and asked me if I had any papers.

“Uh – no. Sorry.”

He stood there in his underwear and signed my two albums, and I was gone.

To this day, I wish I’d had some rolling papers with me.

As time wore on, I kept seeing the drum and bass duo of Sly and Robbie appearing on more and more tracks. Countless recordings.

I don’t know how anyone could keep up with their output. They must have lived in the studio when they weren’t on the road.

Sly and Robbie’s talents were a nexus for countless artists. I mean, the list gets a little crazy:

For starters…

The Jamaican/reggae world

• Black Uhuru

• Peter Tosh

• Bunny Wailer

• Gregory Isaacs

• Dennis Brown

• Jimmy Cliff

• Burning Spear

• The Mighty Diamonds

• Ini Kamoze

• Chaka Demus & Pliers

• Beenie Man

• Sean Paul

• Shabba Ranks

• Sugar Minott

• Yellowman

And then watch what happens when you wander outside Jamaica...

• Grace Jones

• Bob Dylan

• The Rolling Stones

• Mick Jagger

• Joe Cocker

• Serge Gainsbourg

• Ian Dury

• Gwen Guthrie

• Carly Simon

• Yoko Ono

• Herbie Hancock

• Simply Red

• Sinéad O’Connor

• No Doubt

• Sting

And that list just goes and goes and goes.

When Robbie Shakespeare died on December 8, 2021, one of the claims in an obituary was that Robbie had played on as many as 200,000 recordings.

I mean, wut?

Two Hundred Thousand? Do the math. That’s multiple tracks a day, every day they were in the studio. And they also toured a lot, so that daily number of studio tracks looks even more impressive.

Let’s say their effective partnership lasted roughly 45 years.

200,000 ÷ 45 = 4,444 tracks per year.

That’s about 85 tracks every week, every year, for 45 years.

Or around 12 tracks every single day.

Obviously, they weren’t literally recording twelve new songs together 365 days a year for 45 years.

But Jamaican recording culture complicates the arithmetic enormously. One rhythm could generate numerous vocal cuts, DJ versions, instrumentals, dubs, and later remixes. And Sly explicitly said much of their session work wasn’t credited. The number also gets described inconsistently: some sources say played on, others played on or produced, and still others include sampled recordings. Billboard Canada’s obituary, for example, says estimates above 200,000 include remixes and songs sampling their work.

However you look at it, the Sly and Robbie Universe of music is humongous.

200,000 is a legendary figure, and in a sense, it doesn’t even matter.

The way the music industry worked in Jamaica makes things interesting.

A “track” isn’t necessarily synonymous with a new studio performance.

They might cut one rhythm. That rhythm could become:

Original vocal → DJ version → dub → instrumental → alternate mix → another singer’s version → another DJ version → later remix...

Now you can have numerous released tracks derived from one Sly & Robbie rhythm performance.

And that distinction may be exactly how the legendary 200,000 figure ballooned.

It gets even more complicated once sampling enters the picture. Sly’s rhythms have been sampled and reused throughout popular music. A modern track containing a Sly Dunbar sample isn’t another afternoon Sly spent behind the drum kit.

Sly and Robbie first connected in the early ’70s, when Sly was drumming with Skin Flesh and Bones, and Robbie was playing with the Aggrovators. They discovered a shared musical vocabulary that reached well beyond reggae—Motown, Stax, Philly soul and even country music.

As a drummer, what interests me is that Sly wasn’t simply playing the familiar reggae “one-drop” associated with Carlton Barrett of the Wailers. He kept pushing the rhythm forward.

By the mid-’70s, Sly and Robbie were helping establish the harder-driving “Rockers” sound. They moved into Rub-a-Dub in the early ’80s and embraced drum machines, programming, and other digital technology as reggae evolved later in the decade.

That adaptability may be one reason their names keep turning up on records decade after decade.

While their discography on Wikipedia is incomplete, it’s still fun to peruse.

I host a weekly reggae show on a local community radio station, KMUZ-FM. I post the weekly shows at Mixcloud. All to say I keep my eyes and ears open for music to play. About a year ago, I came across a collection called simply ‘Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare.” Over two dozen tracks someone compiled that they played on or produced. Or both.

Cocoa Tea. Barrington Levy. Chaka Demus. Culture. Mighty Diamonds. Michael Palmer. Leroy Smart. Luciano. Johnny Clarke. Half Pint. Dennis Brown. Ernest Wilson. Sugar Minott. The Taxi Gang. Wailing Souls. Gregory Isaacs. Dillinger. Bitty McLean. Beres Hammond. Peter Tosh. Bunny Wailer.

It’s a never-ending list. Hard to know when to start or where to end.

Forty-some years after Sly Dunbar signed those Black Uhuru albums in his underwear, I’m still discovering music he and Robbie left behind.

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The day we were planning to leave, Sunday the 9th, the winds changed and blew smoke from Central Oregon over the intended destination. Not only would that have obscured the skies for night photography, but breathing that kind of air wasn’t in our playbook.

So we punted.

I checked the AQI (Air Quality Index) west of Lakeview, and around Cave Junction, it looked pretty good. Found some campgrounds up near the Oregon Caves Monument, and decided we’d give it a try.

It was well worth it.

That night, as Sunday turned into Monday, we hiked a trail to a viewpoint above the Oregon Caves Monument lodge and sat for about an hour under the dark skies.

George played his guitar.

I shot photos.

It was a spectacular night for stargazing. The Milky Way glistened across the sky; the winds were nonexistent at the 4,371-foot elevation, and it was one of the most pleasant nights I’ve experienced under the stars.

The next day, we took the 90-minute tour through the Oregon Caves Monument and heard how, on November 23, 1874, Elijah Davidson and his dog Bruno were traipsing around the mountain when Bruno found a hole in its side.

Being curious, Bruno went exploring. He was gone for some time.

Eventually, Elijah went in after him.

For light, he carried six wooden matches.

They didn’t last long.

After the last match burned out, Elijah spent about three hours in the pitch-black and eventually made his way out by finding a stream and following it down.

Bruno was waiting for him.

It’s a fascinating tour.

Later that night, we drove the winding three-mile road from our campsite back to the parking lot at the Oregon Caves Monument to catch a presentation on moths in the area. Which was kinda cool, actually. The rangers set up a couple of large white sheets, lit up by black lights, and gave a brief talk about the variety of moth species in the area.

Once that was done, we went back to the parking lot, and I again aimed my camera high:

All in all, a quick and fun trip.

And yes, there are a lot of satellites orbiting the planet.

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As a kid I’d fill notebooks. In high school I became a reporter and photographer for the school paper. Through my twenties I kept journals, notebooks, scraps of paper—anything that seemed worth preserving.

Then, sometime in the late 1980s, I started keeping a notebook beside my bed.

Whenever I woke from a memorable dream, I’d reach over, turn on the light, and write it down before it disappeared.

The habit lasted for years (I can’t remember the last time I actually wrote down a dream).

In the late ‘90s I replaced the notebook with a digital recorder. Instead of fumbling for a pen at three in the morning, I’d simply describe the dream while I could still remember it. Somewhere on a hard drive are a few hundred recordings of dreams that would have otherwise vanished before breakfast.

Recently I stumbled across a small collection that I’d completely forgotten about.

It wasn’t even a dedicated dream journal. It was an old sketchbook from the late 1980s. At some point I’d turned it upside down and started writing dreams from the back cover forward. Maybe twenty or thirty pages.

Reading them was fascinating—not because I suddenly remembered the dreams. I didn’t.

I barely remembered writing them.

Instead, they became little postcards from my subconscious.

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A note before we begin: These dreams mention real friends, family members, coworkers, and the occasional celebrity. I've replaced most names with initials—not because the identities matter, but because they don't. The dreams are the story.

Like the time George Harrison stopped by a radio station my buddy worked at:

Another night I traveled back in time to meet my two-year-old self, wondering if my father recognized me.

These took place when I lived with a roommate, Gregory, in a 100-year-old house on a 100-acre farm near Hillsboro.

One night I had a dream about a rock concert on the grounds. The mention of jelloheads that made me laugh.

And then the one where Billy Gibbons had shaved most of his beard (by this time in my life, I’d me Billy five or six times).

Then the time Quincy Jones supposedly produced “Workin’ For a Livin’” by Huey Lewis and the News. Even in the dream I didn’t believe him:

Somewhere else there was an air hole in the backyard, quietly growing something beneath the earth.

I don’t know why I started writing my dreams down. Probably just something fun and interesting to do at the time.

Maybe I thought they’d reveal something profound.

Maybe I just didn’t want to lose a good story.

Whatever the reason, I’m glad I did.

Not because I can analyze them now.

Because forty years later they’ve become something I never expected: a record of the landscape inside my own head.

We spend a lot of time photographing the outside of our lives. Dream journals do something stranger. They preserve what was happening when no one—including us—was paying attention.

Most of the photos were experiments from my early days with a camera—lots of attempts, plenty of failures, and the occasional surprise.

One thing that surprised me was discovering a small trove of photographs of places that have changed—or disappeared entirely. Among them were several Portland record stores and head shops from the mid-1970s, photographed while I was a Radio Communications student at Mt. Hood Community College.

Here’s a small collection that I titled Portland Record Stores, Head Shops. Most of the images are exterior, but there are a couple from inside that reveal some detail of what they looked like back then.

Let's start with a few head shops. They were a regular stop for my small circle of friends and me. Cannabis was still illegal, of course, but that didn't stop these stores from selling just about everything except the weed itself.

One record store I made it to just a couple of times was a bit of a drive: from Gresham, through downtown Portland and out towards Beaverton, you’d find Everybody’s Records. Here’s the only shot I have of it:

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But the place we went to most was Music Millennium, at 32nd and Burnside (that link goes to a fascinating and very informative article about the store).

The store opened in 1969, and in the fall of ‘73, a few buddies of mine and I would hop onto Burnside in Gresham and follow it all the way to 32nd. The drive often looked like this:

We’d spend an hour or more just pawing through records, digging on the sounds coming out of the store speakers, soaking up the smell of incense (or whatever it was), and being amazed at the incredible collection. I was fascinated by the wide choices of imports, which were not readily available anywhere else. No doubt, a number of those imports are still in my collection.

Looking back, I wish I’d had the foresight to make a project out of photographing every record store and head shop I could find. There would have been dozens more images—and an even richer record of a Portland that’s largely disappeared.

Still, I’m grateful these few negatives survived. They’ve become little windows into a city and a time in my life that I can still visit from time to time.

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First, he had produced several Foghat albums and was considered something of an unofficial member of the band. Most notably, he produced Fool for the City, the 1975 album that gave us Foghat’s biggest hit, “Slow Ride.”

Second, he’d released an album called Already Free in 1977.

That’s it.

Yet somehow, Already Free became one of those records that never quite left my turntable.

Back in 1977, I was the music director at a Top 40 radio station in Salem, Oregon. Every week, record promoters would send boxes of new albums and 45s, all hoping theirs would be the one we’d put into rotation.

Most of those records disappeared as quickly as they arrived.

Nick Jameson’s didn’t.

I don’t remember exactly what the record promoter told me, but I’m sure he mentioned Jameson’s connection to Foghat. It probably gave the album a little extra credibility in my mind. Whatever the reason, I took it home, put it on the turntable...

...and kept playing it.

It never produced a hit single, but that didn’t matter. Already Free was one of those albums that felt effortlessly authentic. Bluesy without trying too hard. Rocking without being flashy. It had groove, soul, and personality. Jameson’s voice wasn’t polished in the conventional sense—it was rough around the edges—but it fit the songs perfectly. Sometimes the right voice isn’t the prettiest one. It’s the one that tells the truth.

Not to mention Jameson enlisted blues legend Paul Butterfield to play harmonica on several tracks. One of my favorites is “In the Blue,” which includes the wonderful line, “They say that love pays in advance for the blues...” Butterfield’s harp is exactly what the song needed. Check it out while you finish the piece:

Jameson released a follow-up album, A Crowd of One, in 1986. Its single, “The Weatherman,” briefly cracked the Billboard Hot 100 before being covered a year later by Jack Wagner as “Weatherman Says.”

If you compare the two album covers, they’re almost hard to believe belong to the same artist. In 1977, Jameson looked like he could have wandered out of the Southern California rock scene that gave us the Eagles, CSN, and Loggins & Messina (see the back side below). By 1986, A Crowd of One presented a far slicker, MTV-era image—styled hair, polished production, and very much a product of its decade. The music changed, and so did the packaging.

Long before his solo career, Jameson had been part of the Philadelphia band The American Dream, whose 1970 debut carried the distinction of being Todd Rundgren’s first production credit.

That alone would make for a respectable musical resume.

Then, a few years ago, I stumbled across something that completely surprised me.

Wait...

Nick Jameson’s an actor?

Not just an actor—a busy actor.

One of those “Wait...that guy?” moments.

How had I never put that together?

He played Russian President Yuri Suvarov for three seasons of 24. He appeared in Lost, The King of Queens, Mission Hill, The Critic, and dozens of other television shows. His voice became familiar to millions through animation and video games, where he built an impressive second career portraying characters with uncanny authenticity.

It turns out that authenticity had a foundation.

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Although Jameson was born in the United States, he spent much of his childhood moving throughout Europe with his family. The experience exposed him to different languages, dialects, and accents, skills that later became invaluable as a voice actor.

Looking back, it almost makes perfect sense.

The same musician whose singing always sounded believable became an actor whose voices sounded believable, too.

Nick Jameson never became a household name. He wasn’t the superstar on stage or the face on the movie poster. Instead, he quietly assembled one of those remarkable careers that spans music, production, television, film, and voice acting. Chances are you’ve heard him—or watched him—far more often than you realize.

As for me, whenever I think of Nick Jameson, I don’t picture a television role first.

I picture a cardboard box full of promotional LPs arriving at a little radio station in Salem in 1977...and one overlooked album that deserved a lot more attention than it ever received.

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Over the past six years, these characters have become surprisingly real to me. They’ve argued, laughed, kept secrets, made mistakes, and occasionally surprised me by taking the story in directions I never anticipated. Some are fiercely loyal. Some are quietly ambitious. Some carry burdens that have shaped their entire lives. And nearly all of them are hiding something.

As Forged in Ancient Fire moves closer to publication, I thought it would be fun to introduce you to the cast. Think of this as a spoiler-light guide to the people you’ll meet when you open the book—and perhaps a glimpse into why I’ve enjoyed spending so much time in their world.

We’ll leave Jia, our main protagonist, for last. Let’s start with her best friend:

ZILLY

Jia's best friend since fifth grade, Zilly is fiercely loyal, wonderfully sarcastic, and almost impossible to shock. A bass player and ancient-language geek, she also shoulders far more responsibility than most teenagers, helping raise her younger brother while their alcoholic mother battles her addiction. Her humor keeps Jia grounded, but when Jia's life begins unraveling in impossible ways, Zilly is forced to confront a question neither of them expected: What do you do when your best friend starts experiencing things that shouldn't exist?

SANDY O’CONNOR (Jia’s mother)

Though Forged in Ancient Fire opens just after her death, Sandy's presence is felt on nearly every page. A beloved high school English teacher, devoted mother, and hidden sorceress, she spent sixteen years doing everything she could to give Jia a normal childhood while quietly shielding her from an ancient magical legacy. The secrets she kept were never born of distrust, but of love—and the hope that Jia might have a chance at an ordinary life. Even after she's gone, Sandy's wisdom, courage, and sacrifices continue to guide her daughter, proving that some of the most important characters never truly leave the story.

KIM PARK (Jia’s father)

For sixteen years, Kim has loved his daughter from half a world away.

Before Jia was born, family obligations forced him to return to Seoul, leaving Sandy to raise their daughter alone in California. The separation was never what either of them wanted, but duty demanded a sacrifice that neither fully recovered from.

Quiet, thoughtful, and carrying decades of regret, Kim is suddenly given an unexpected second chance when Jia discovers he’s still alive. He longs to become the father he never had the opportunity to be, even as he realizes he’s asking a grieving teenager to trust a complete stranger. As a respected member of one of Korea’s oldest magical families, Kim understands far more about Jia’s inheritance than he’s willing to reveal—but protecting her means uncovering secrets that have remained hidden for generations.

DAE-WON (Jia’s Korean Grandfather)

The patriarch of a family whose magical lineage stretches back for centuries, Dae-Won has spent a lifetime guiding, protecting, and sometimes challenging those entrusted to carry that legacy forward. Now in his eighties, he knows his time is growing short, and the future of the family weighs heavily on his mind.

When Jia unexpectedly enters his life, he immediately senses something extraordinary about her. But potential alone has never impressed him. Rather than accept her at face value, he quietly sets a test in motion—not to measure her power, but to discover her courage, compassion, and character. What he learns will shape not only Jia’s future, but the future of the entire family.

JUN-YOUNG (Jia’s Aunt and her father’s twin sister)

For years, Jun-Young has watched opportunities pass her by while others stepped into positions of influence within the family. As Dae-Won’s daughter, she has long believed she was capable of helping shape its future, yet tradition and circumstance repeatedly left her on the sidelines. She hasn’t forgotten.

Bold, ambitious, and intensely private, Jun-Young is determined to prove she deserves a greater role in the family’s leadership. She carefully chooses what she reveals, preferring to keep her long-term plans hidden until the moment is right. Whether her ambition will strengthen the family—or divide it—remains one of the story’s lingering questions.

BAEM (Jia’s Great Aunt)

To most people, Baem appears quietly perceptive and politely kind—a woman content to remain in the background. In truth, she serves as Dae-Won’s personal emissary, keeping a careful eye on the family and the dangers that surround it. She has secrets of her own, reveals only what she chooses, and possesses an uncanny ability to sense trouble long before anyone else. Those who mistake her gentleness for weakness rarely make that mistake twice.

JI-WON

A lifelong friend and trusted advisor to Dae-Won, Ji-Won has devoted his life to training young sorcerers, teaching that discipline, character, and judgment are far more important than magical talent alone. Calm and thoughtful, he carries himself with quiet confidence, but the weight of a decades-old secret is never far beneath the surface. Jia initially sees him as another mysterious figure from her father’s past. Over time, however, Ji-Won comes to recognize something extraordinary in her—not simply her gifts, but her compassion—and becomes one of the most important guides on her journey.

GOO (Dae-Won’s goddaughter)

At just six years old, Goo is the beloved goddaughter of Dae-Won and a bright light within the extended family. Curious, fearless, and quick to trust, she has a way of bringing warmth to everyone around her. But when she’s abducted by unknown agents, her disappearance sets into motion a chain of events that draws Jia into a hidden world of ancient magic, family secrets, and dangerous enemies. Rescuing Goo becomes Jia’s first true test—and the beginning of a journey that will change both of their lives forever.

SEUNG-MIN CHO

Every mystery has someone standing just outside the light.

Cho is brilliant, calculating, and deeply committed to understanding powers that have remained hidden for centuries. Whether his motivations are noble, dangerous, or something in between depends on who is telling the story. One thing is certain: he has been watching events unfold long before Jia realizes she’s part of them. Cho is aligned with the secretive sorcery group Circle of Thorns.

MYSTIC ALLIANCE

The Mystic Alliance is an international organization dedicated to preserving the balance between the magical and ordinary worlds. While its members often work together to confront common threats, they don't always agree on how those threats should be handled. Dae-Won and his family have long maintained a respectful—but independent—relationship with the Alliance. They share common goals, but neither side is entirely comfortable placing its fate in the other's hands.

THE CIRCLE OF THORNS

If the Mystic Alliance represents stewardship, the Circle of Thorns represents ambition.

Operating in secrecy, the Circle believes magical power should be pursued, expanded, and controlled by those strong enough to wield it. Its members are patient, resourceful, and willing to manipulate events from the shadows to achieve their goals. Rarely acting in the open, they prefer influence over confrontation, making them a dangerous adversary—and one whose true reach is difficult to measure.

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JIA

At first glance, Jia is an ordinary sixteen-year-old trying to navigate high school, music, friendships, and an uncertain future. A gifted pianist with dreams of attending college and forming a successful band, she never imagined her life would be defined by ancient magic or family secrets.

The sudden death of her mother changes everything.

As Jia begins unraveling the mystery of her inheritance, she’s drawn into a hidden world that stretches back more than a thousand years. Along the way, she’s longing for a father she barely knew, an extended family on the other side of the world, and a destiny far greater than anything she could have imagined.

But what truly sets Jia apart isn’t the magic she’s inherited—it’s the choices she makes. Compassionate, fiercely loyal, and unwilling to abandon those in need, she repeatedly chooses empathy over fear and courage over certainty. Her journey is ultimately not about becoming more powerful. It’s about becoming the person she was always meant to be.

To download the full six-page character sketch of Jia, click here (PDF).

Quick update. We’re going through the last proofreading rounds of the interior design…won’t be long until this book will be available at bookstores all over.

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But in many ways, the free-for-all approach is the best description. I’ve wandered the streets of downtown Salem on the first day of summer for years, camera in hand, capturing some fun images.

I thought I’d make it an assignment this year. Have fun checking out these images.

Participants and organizers breathed a sigh of relief when the weather forecast showed sunny skies and highs in the low 80s. After a day of steady rain on last year’s Make Music Day, it was a big relief.

You’ll notice I photographed quite a few dogs. I love dogs, and there were quite a few making their pawed appearances. Music ranged from experienced rock bands that play frequently to punk bands that might rarely get out of the garage, from blues and bluegrass to acoustic, horns, kids banging on plastic buckets with drumsticks, and more.

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I had a fun moment when BGA started playing under a couple of pop-up tents in an alley. A few weeks back, I had listened to Cheap Trick’s 1977 album, In Color. The opening song is called Hello There, and it kicks ass. At less than two minutes long, it had better. I’d almost forgotten about the song, but when I heard it, my first thought was, “Man, if I had a band, it would be awesome to start the set with this song.”

BGA opened the set with "Hello There," and it kicked ass. Gave me a nice smile.

Make Music Day is over for 2026, but who knows, maybe there’s a local city or town near you taking part. Check it out. Good times, and definitely a fun day to wander around with a camera.

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My first record, when I was eight in 1964, was Slow Down backed with Matchbox. A short time later came A Hard Day’s Night, and for years I devoured anything Beatle-related—records, magazines, photos, stories, whatever I could find.

When the band broke up in 1970, it felt like the end of something enormous.

Soon afterward, the bootlegs began appearing: expensive, hard to find, often poor quality... but irresistible if you were a serious fan.

So if you saw one in a record store, did you take a chance? Or let it go?

I grabbed a few over the years, but only a few. My favorite is one called Sessions, which included the long-rumored Beatles cover of the old Little Willie John song, Leave My Kitten Alone.

Having a few Beatles or related boots in my collection made me feel pretty good. Like I was on the inside, ahead of other Beatles fans.

By 1983, I’d moved from Salem to Portland, and by 1985 I found myself working part-time in radio at KEX, a popular AM station that shared studios with Z100, a popular FM hit music station. Because the two stations were in the same building, it wasn’t unusual to interact with employees of the other station. And as a part-timer, I had the opportunity to fill in at Z100. Knowing I loved the Beatles, a fellow employee suggested I meet another fan who was also working at the station as the production director.

That’s when I met Archer.

I tried to impress him by naming a few boots.

It didn’t really work.

Within about sixty seconds, it became obvious that my little collection was amateur hour. I wasn't talking to another Beatles fan. I was talking to the Beatles guy.

And Archer loved to share the wealth.

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He invited me to his apartment so we could listen to some of his collection while he put together a cassette of a few Beatles bootlegs.

It became a regular thing. I’d go over, hang out for a couple of hours, while he ran off cassette copies. He’d pop a cassette into the deck, say something like, “This is a live recording from a 1963 Swedish TV show right on the verge of Beatlemania. You can actually hear the music. When they returned to England after this, Beatlemania was everywhere.”

We’d listen to outtakes, alternate takes, flubs, live recordings, and more while smoking a little weed, laughing, and getting to be friends.

Good times.

What struck me wasn't just what he had. It was how eager he was to share it.

Radio took him all over the country—Los Angeles, New York, Houston, and elsewhere. He became one of those gifted production people other broadcasters admired, creating jingles, producing shows, and, whenever possible, finding another excuse to celebrate the Beatles.

In October 1989, he was in NYC as a morning show producer at WPLJ. He invited me for a visit. My first time on the East Coast. We were amazed at what he and his wife were paying for rent for a one-bedroom studio apartment a couple of blocks south of Rockefeller Center: over $1,000 a month!

I spent a week there. More Beatle Boots cassettes. Stories about living in NYC, like how, when they moved to NYC, they got rid of their car within a week. Who wants a car in Manhattan? About how, when a local small grocery store kept seeing them a few times a week, it started charging them ‘local’ prices, which were about half of what it charged tourists.

I came home with more cassettes. Over the years, they added up. Dozens of them. Hundreds of recordings.

He moved back to Portland around twenty years ago to take a production job at KINK-FM. We got together a few times for a meal, but we didn't see each other often. Even so, he continued sharing the wealth, only now in ways better suited to the digital age: links to newly discovered Beatles bootlegs (there were always more, he insisted), his annual Christmas shows, and whatever else he thought I'd enjoy.

I once asked him where he got all of this material. He obviously had some inside sources. The only name he dropped was legendary producer Tony Visconti, but he was generally coy about where it all came from.

A few other fun facts about Archer. He was a huge Three Stooges fan and could talk for hours about their films. He collected as many as he could get his hands on. The same with Monty Python. He loved them. The good thing is that I did, too, so we had a lot more to talk about.

We hadn’t been in contact for several years. I’d known him as a soft-spoken guy who didn't seek the spotlight. I’d heard through friends that he was in bad health.

I wasn’t surprised when I heard Archer had died in mid-May. I was sad all the same.

People like Archer don’t come along very often. He knew more about the Beatles than almost anyone I’ve ever met, but that’s not why I remember him. I remember him because he delighted in sharing what he loved. Every cassette he handed me said the same thing:

“You’ve got to hear this.”

And just because I was so knocked out by one of the recordings Archer gave me way back when, I want to give you a chance to hear it. Pretty sure it’s on the Anthology, but this is from the cassette Archer gave me back in the late 80s.

From October 1963, The Beatles live on Swedish TV:

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Given that I’m a totally unknown author in the world of fiction, it didn’t take long for me to discover that the traditional process of publishing was probably going to be a dead end. I queried numerous agents and got a few encouraging words and a few replies, but mostly I was invisible.

Also, given that when I started querying a few years ago, I was in my late 60s, it wasn’t hard to do the math: I could spend five or more years trying to succeed in the traditional path. But that would likely leave me in the same place as when I started. And somewhere in my 70s. Naah.

But there are other routes open today that didn’t exist a few decades ago.

Knowing that some authors were publishing fiction on Substack, I saw that as a viable way to get my story out into the open. I also knew that posting two chapters a week for ten months would sharpen my eye, help me finally shape the story (which was still pretty good from my perspective), and prepare it for actual publication.

You know, the kind where you hold a book in your hand. With your name on it.

So I began.

But I also recognized the elephant in the room. The manuscript was too long. Not too long to tell the story, or too long to publish on Substack, where bandwidth is unlimited. But it was too long for a typical Urban Fantasy novel.

While posting two chapters a week, I began cutting bloated scenes, trimming expansive descriptions (have I mentioned I tend to overwrite?), and tightening the action.

In a strange twist, I found myself revisiting chapters that readers had already seen. Weird process, I know, but the story benefited enormously from the second pass. By the time I finished posting the book on Substack, the original 150,000-word manuscript had become much slimmer at around 85,000 words: much more in line with what readers might expect from a standard genre novel.

I didn’t gain a big following from publishing on Substack, but I did learn something: there were several die-hard readers who couldn't wait to see what would happen next to Jia as she navigated grief, family secrets, and a world she never knew existed.

And I heard from them. Often.

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Cover Reveal

Fast-forward to today. I’ve been working with a New Zealand company, Damonza, which was recommended by a successful author for both cover design and interior formatting.

Their services fit comfortably within the budget I had set aside for publishing, and I quickly discovered why they came so highly recommended. In early May, I sent them a cover design brief. They returned with a few samples. I picked one and had them revise it a handful of times until I was happy with it. During the process, I also posted some examples on my personal Facebook page, which garnered thoughtful responses.

That process is over now.

Without further ado, here’s the final cover for Forged in Ancient Fire.

Seeing the finished cover for the first time was one of those moments when the whole project suddenly became real. After years of shepherding the story through numerous revisions, suddenly there was a cover. A title. My name. It felt less like a manuscript and more like a book.

You’ll notice that at the bottom it says “Book One.” That was a conscious decision, given that I have a number of Jia stories half-written, or in various stages of completion. It was also a commitment. I decided to include that small signifier because I’m about 33,000 words into book two. The print version of Forged in Ancient Fire will include the first chapter of the follow-up, Margin of Error, as a teaser. It feels great to actually feel that confident in the follow-up that I’m already putting a little bit of it out there.

Self-Publishing Processes

Having self-published two nonfiction books in the tradeshow world in the last dozen years, I was no stranger to the system. Getting ISBN numbers, creating a copyright page, deciding how to distribute the book and which companies would handle the print-on-demand editions. Some things have changed, but it’s a process I’m not unfamiliar with.

There’s a lot to work through when you become a publisher. You have to set your author hat aside in exchange for a publisher’s hat. And in choosing Damonza, I made the conscious decision that when someone picked up the book from a bookstore shelf, it would look and feel like something from a major publishing house. Not only the cover, but the interior design had to look professional.

And that’s where I am now: going through the PDF version of the interior design (which looks great, by the way), finding small things that still need fixing. I suspect that no matter how many eyes are on the manuscript, or how many times those eyes review it with a proofreader’s approach, something will slip through.

The End is in Sight

And that’s where I am now: reviewing the first interior proofs, making small corrections, and trying to catch the inevitable inconsistencies that somehow survive every previous round of editing. I suspect that no matter how many eyes examine a manuscript, something always slips through.

Books, I am learning, are finished by inches.

Still, after seven years of writing, revising, cutting, learning, and occasionally wondering whether I’d ever get to this stage, seeing those interior pages on the screen feels a little surreal.

We’re close now.

Very close.

And if all goes according to plan, sometime later this summer I’ll finally get to do something I’ve imagined for a very long time.

I’ll hold a copy of Forged in Ancient Fire in my hands.

And so can you.

For some reason, I kept putting it off.

Part of it was uncertainty. The Capitol sits inside a state park, and I wasn’t completely sure what permissions were required. Most of my drone work involves photographing homes for real estate listings, not flying around one of Oregon’s most recognizable landmarks. And if I’m being honest, part of it was simply confidence. I wasn’t quite ready.

I had seen plenty of drone footage from rallies and protests at the Capitol on social media. Whether those pilots had gone through the authorization process or simply launched and hoped for the best, I had no idea. I knew that if I was going to do it, I wanted to do it legally.

Fortunately, getting authorization isn't complicated. You submit a request with a location, time, and altitude, and in many cases approval comes quickly. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you wait. But the system generally works.

A couple of weeks ago, I finally submitted the request.

The plan was simple: arrive before sunrise and catch the first light striking the Capitol from the northeast.

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By Saturday evening, though, the forecast wasn’t encouraging. Rain had moved through, and Sunday looked mostly cloudy. Still, my weather app hinted at a brief window of sunshine right around sunrise.

That was enough.

At five o’clock Sunday morning, I climbed out of bed and headed downtown.

And got lucky:

I put the drone up around 5:45 a.m.

The sun still wasn’t cooperating, hidden behind a layer of clouds. So I spent the next twenty minutes exploring the approved flight area, capturing images from a variety of angles and elevations while I waited to see what the morning would do.

Like these:

Then I noticed a break in the clouds.

A few minutes later, sunlight began filtering through. Suddenly, the Capitol lit up, glowing against the darker sky around it. I repositioned the drone several times and captured as many angles as I could before the moment disappeared.

And just as quickly as it arrived, it was gone.

The sun slipped behind another bank of clouds, and the Capitol returned to flat morning light. I waited a few more minutes, hoping for a second opening, but it never came. Satisfied that I’d captured what I came for, I brought the drone home.

A few notes about the images: everything was processed in Lightroom, and on several photographs I used a sky-enhancement filter to add a bit more drama to the clouds. I also experimented with different altitudes, sometimes placing the Golden Pioneer above the horizon line and sometimes below it, just to see how the composition changed from one image to the next.

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Music was always in our house: my mom played piano, violin, flute, piccolo, and guitar. My dad was a drummer in high school, although he never really played much after that. Still, I inherited his marching drum, and one day when I was in my early teens, he strapped it on and played marching cadences like he’d been doing it his whole life.

Kinda blew my mind.

The first band that captured my attention was The Beatles.

The first record I purchased with my allowance at age eight was The Beatles’ “Slowdown” b/w “Matchbox.”

The first album I bought was “A Hard Day’s Night.”

My musical path was laid out in front of me.

I can’t imagine life without music. And, given that I’m turning 71 next week, I’ve had a lot of time to think about music, memory, and what sticks with you.

Decades later, I still instinctively tap those same cadences on steering wheels and tabletops.

The theory itself isn’t particularly complicated: the music that you learn to love in your early years, say from about ten to 25, sticks with you for the rest of your life, overshadowing almost everything that comes afterward.

For me, starting around eight or nine, that meant the Beatles. If you’d have asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up then, the answer was easy: I want to be a Beatle.

The Rolling Stones were mysterious and elusive, but I dove into Aftermath, Between the Buttons, Their Satanic Majesty’s Request, looking for clues. I didn’t necessarily find any, but the search was delightful.

The Dave Clark Five were a bottom-heavy, powerpop group from England before the term had even been coined. Paul Revere and the Raiders were a pop-rock band from Oregon. The Troggs pushed the limit with lyrics hinting at things that I, as a ten-year-old, could only imagine. The Yardbirds, The Who, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and others that were blasting on my radio and cheap stereo from 1964 on.

Then, as I moved into my teens in the late 60s, along came The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, David Bowie, T. Rex, Supertramp, Steely Dan. The list goes on and on.

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You know the drill. If you were born in the Fifties, all of those are familiar names. What bands that arrived after your mid-twenties have had as much impact—or mean as much to you—as those early favorites? Regardless of when you were born, I feel that—if you love music and really dig into it—those early years of your life, where you are becoming aware of the kinds of acts and the styles of music you’re exposed to, never fade.

After more than six decades of listening, collecting records, playing drums, working in radio, and arguing about music with friends, I keep coming back to the same conclusion.

And believe me, I’ve spent a lifetime trying to prove myself wrong.

Yeah, other bands came along later. I love acts like Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Live, Def Leppard, Rush, Heart, R.E.M., Talking Heads, The Police and so on. But they aren’t imprinted as deeply as those from my early years.

Maybe it’s because music arrives while we’re figuring out who we are. First girlfriends. First cars. First freedom. First heartbreak. First jobs. First failures. Music doesn’t simply soundtrack those years—it becomes attached to them. Thirty, forty, fifty years later, hearing the right song can still instantly transport you.

I still discover new music. I still love new music.
But if I’m being honest, those records that got inside my head between ten and twenty-five still own the real estate.

And if my theory is right, you’re probably already thinking about yours.

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The book, written by Graeme Thomson, is a no-holds-barred look at a unique figure in the rock-and-roll world. Philip Lynott was a Dubliner, which, according to the opening paragraph of the book’s introduction, were the ‘blacks of Ireland.’ If that weren’t enough, Lynott was a black Dubliner in a white Irish world. A ‘veritable double whammy of otherness.’

Lynott stood out because of his color, and his height. His ‘otherness.’

Once he figured it out, he was ‘ridiculously good at being a rock star,’ a ‘crooner seduced by high voltage and heavy wattage.’

The writer behind “The Boys are Back in Town” and “Cowboy Song,” records that got a lot of airplay on rock radio in the 70s and 80s, and still show up on Classic Rock stations.

I first heard Thin Lizzy as a freshman in college. It was 1973, I was attending Mt. Hood Community College in Gresham, Oregon, and my roommate and radio course friends latched onto a local free-form rock station, KQIV, which supposedly broadcast in quadrophonic. But who had quadrophonic radios?

Didn’t matter. The station played everything. Jocks had freedom to spin whatever they wanted in the world of rock. Which, at the time in the early 70s, saw countless bands coming to the surface, in a wild milieu of southern rock, California rock, NY rock, glitter rock, folk rock, and on and on.

I was enchanted, especially by “Vagabonds of the Western World,” the title track of Thin Lizzy’s third album. The opening lines drew me in like being lassoed by that cowboy he’d later sing about:

I could tell you the story of a vagabond

A playboy of the western world

One day by chance he came upon

A fair young maid, a country girl

The song went on to tell a tale of a guy who wandered the country, an adventurer who somehow made women fall in love with him, all while living a life most people could only dream about.

If that weren’t enough, then on the same album along came “The Hero and The Madman,” with a narrated opening:

The hero rode a white horse

Across the desert to where his woman was

He’d been riding for four days

When he saw the tower where she was locked

In the moonlight, he left his old steed

Near the drawbridge that he crossed

And by way of a rope ladder

He tippy-toed to where his woman was

I was hooked. I had to have the album. No doubt it took a trip to the brand-new Music Millennium on Burnside, but there it was, my new musical find.

I’ve been a Thin Lizzy fan ever since. Got to see them in 1976 as an opener for Queen at the Portland Paramount. The band released a dozen studio albums between 1971 and 1983. They also put out a stunning live document “Live and Dangerous,” which has appeared on numerous lists as one of the greatest live albums (Side note: Huey Lewis, who, as the story goes, had hitch hiked around Europe with his harmonica, ended up becoming friends with Lynott, and is credited on Live and Dangerous as special thanks to “Bluesy Huey Lewis”).

I’ve made it through a number of rock biographies, but I’ll be honest, I didn’t expect to run across one about Philip Lynott. Thirty or so years ago, I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to write a biography of him?’ I’m glad someone finally got to it. That someone is Graeme Thomson, who’s also written books about Kate Bush, Simple Minds, George Harrison, John Martyn, Willie Nelson, and more.

Thomson puts it all down: Lynott’s rough upbringing in Ireland, the fits and starts he had to manage as he made his way toward music, writing songs, and being a singer and bass player. How Philip knew that to break through, they had to have a hit single, and how the old Irish classic “Whiskey in the Jar” became that breakthrough, but also became a chain around the band’s neck as they tried to break free of the expectation that they were just going to do rock versions of old Irish classics.

Interestingly enough, “Vagabonds of the Western World” was that breakthrough. It lifted them out of obscurity and into tours with much bigger name bands such as Faces, David Bowie, Status Quo, Canned Heat and Uriah Heep. Early on, Philip was uncomfortable onstage, barely interacting with the audience, and the band was booed off more than once because frankly, they didn’t really know what exactly they were doing or what it took to break through.

The Artist Behind the Cover of ‘Vagabonds’

One fascinating detail I didn’t connect until reading the book: the cover art for Vagabonds of the Western World was created by Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick, who became one of Philip’s closest friends.

If the name sounds familiar, there’s a reason.

Just a few years earlier, Fitzpatrick created the now-iconic red-and-black image of Che Guevara that became one of the most reproduced political images in modern history. That stylized portrait eventually appeared on posters, murals, album covers, T-shirts, and dorm room walls around the world.

Looking back, it feels strangely appropriate that the same artist helped shape the visual mythology of Thin Lizzy.

Because Vagabonds of the Western World already sounds larger than life before the needle even drops. The title alone suggests wandering outsiders, half-poets and half-rebels drifting through a romanticized landscape somewhere between folklore and hard reality.

Which, honestly, also describes a lot of Philip Lynott’s songwriting.

Some things that stand out about Philip and Thin Lizzy, in my (almost) complete read of the book.

Three Pieces to Four

The original band was Phil Lynott, guitarist Eric Bell, and drummer Brian Downey. A three-piece. Bell was a phenomenal player, but by late 1973, the pressure, drinking, and instability had caught up with him. During a New Year’s Eve show in Belfast, Bell—drunk, struggling, and barely able to play—walked offstage mid-set.

It could have ended Thin Lizzy.

Instead, Lynott regrouped and rebuilt, bringing in the dual-guitar lineup of Brian Robertson and Scott Gorham that would help define the band’s classic sound.

An acquaintance later asked Philip why he wanted two guitarists. His answer was pure Lynott:

“The next time one of those cunts walks out there will be another one there.”

Growing up rather sheltered in the mountains of Oregon, it was great to be exposed to these larger-than-life records, with stories imagining roads, cities, danger, romance, loneliness, and more. It made these human beings mythological as rock stars. At 19, I knew that adulthood was ‘somewhere out there,’ and records like these really fed that part of me.

Decades later, “Cowboy Song” still feels cinematic to me. Not nostalgic exactly. Alive.

I can still see that photo from the album cover. Philip Lynott looking away from the camera, somewhere between confidence and exhaustion, like he already knew something the rest of us didn’t.

Back then, thirty-six sounded old. Now it feels impossibly young.

And maybe that’s part of why the song still matters. Not because it captures the mythology of the wandering cowboy. Because underneath all the swagger and movement, you can hear someone trying to outrun loneliness before it catches him.

Philip Lynott died in 1986 at just 36 years old. But every time that opening line comes on, he’s still out there riding somewhere.

Last week I was back in the same spot, and thought I’d try my hand again. While you can read my original post and see the images from that night, I’ve discovered that there are a couple of things that I may have failed to mention.

One: Yes, you must capture a clear image of the Milky Way on a clear night with no moon. Once you have a handle on the basics, experiment with exposure and ISO settings.

But… the real magic happens when you get back in front of the computer. Most photographers I learn from use Adobe’s Lightroom, which does a solid job of post-production tuning for images.

Shortly after my first attempt at Milky Way photography, I watched a 45-minute video in which someone walked through how to adjust settings like exposure, contrast, highlights, blacks, whites, and more.

All of that’s good, and the tutorial certainly taught me things. But after watching it, and experimenting with things such as vibrance, saturation, texture, clarity, and more, I realized it all comes down to what you like.

So here are a handful of images from last week, taken during a chilly 1:30 am foray outside the tent on Lake Simtustus in central Oregon on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation.

Fun stuff!

I made about a dozen images, and burnished four of them in Lightroom.

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The station was KACI in The Dalles, Oregon, a little 1,000-watt daytimer about ninety miles east of Portland. Within a week, I’d somehow been promoted to Music Director, a role I immediately fell in love with.

At the time, stations like ours divided music into categories. There were “currents” — the newest hits. “Recurrents” — songs that had been hits in the last couple of years. And “oldies,” which in 1975 meant anything more than about five years old.

One of the more unusual recurrents sitting in our racks that spring was a song called “Butter Boy” by a band named Fanny.

“He was hard as a rock, and I was ready to roll…”

Looking back, I’m amazed we played it at all.

Apparently our general manager wasn’t listening too closely.

The song had enough innuendo packed into it to raise a few eyebrows even in the mid-70s:

“Get it on, boy
Show what you know
There’s a fire down below…”

Still, “Butter Boy” was a modest hit, peaking at #29 on Billboard’s Hot 100 the very week I started at KACI. Big enough to get some airplay, even on a conservative little station that generally preferred not to scare anybody.

To me, Fanny was simply another one-hit band drifting through the pop landscape of the era. Clever song. Slightly risqué lyrics. Memorable enough that I kept a copy of the single around

After that song peaked, they disappeared.

Or at least that’s how it seemed to me.

Like thousands of other songs from that period, “Butter Boy” slowly drifted into the fog of old radio memories. I didn’t think much about Fanny again for nearly fifty years.

Until a couple of weeks ago.

I stumbled across an article about the band (it’s worth reading!), and suddenly I realized I had completely underestimated them.

Fanny wasn’t some novelty act built around a suggestive pop song. They were pioneers.

Formed in the late 1960s by sisters Jean and June Millington — Filipino Americans who moved from Manila to California — Fanny became one of the first all-female rock bands signed to a major label. Between 1970 and 1975, they released five studio albums, toured relentlessly, and earned the respect of some of the biggest musicians in the world.

Which, honestly, surprised me.

Not because they were women — though the music industry at the time certainly made that difficult enough — but because radio in the 70s often flattened artists into whatever single happened to crack the charts. If a band only had one recognizable hit, that’s often all you knew about them.

But listening now, what strikes me most is how good they actually were.

Tight. Funky. Confident. Serious musicians.

Not “good for an all-female band,” which was the patronizing lens they constantly fought against, but genuinely strong rock players who could stand alongside almost anyone from that era.

David Bowie loved them. Todd Rundgren produced one of their albums. Members of The Beatles and Little Feat admired them. Barbra Streisand was a fan.

At one point, Fanny visited Apple Studios in London, where Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick quickly realized these women knew exactly what they were doing in the studio. According to June Millington, he was almost shocked — not because they were pretending to be musicians, but because they were obviously the real thing.

And then there’s the Bowie connection.

It’s said that “Butter Boy” was inspired by David Bowie himself.

At the time, though, the members of Fanny barely knew who Bowie was.

Apparently he’d sent them an early album with a handwritten note saying, “I love you, and here’s my first record.”

Later, when Bowie and Fanny happened to be playing Liverpool on the same night, he invited them to a party at the hotel where both acts were staying. They went — still not entirely sure who this strange, theatrical Englishman really was.

That detail somehow makes the whole story even better.

By 1975, just as “Butter Boy” was climbing the charts, the band itself was already falling apart. Burned out from years of touring and frustrated by the limitations the industry placed on them, Fanny broke up right as they were finally brushing against wider commercial success.

There was a brief reunion tour afterward, but the moment had largely passed.

Still, the story didn’t end there.

In 2018, decades after most people assumed Fanny had vanished for good, members of the band reunited to record a new album called Fanny Walked the Earth.

By then, Jean and June Millington — along with original drummer Brie Howard-Darling — were in their late 60s and early 70s.

And according to June, stepping back into the studio “felt like we were 17 again.”

Funny how music works that way.

In 1975, “Butter Boy” was just another recurrent sitting in a stack of singles at a tiny Oregon radio station. A catchy little hit with lyrics that somehow slipped past management.

Decades later, I finally realized that Fanny had been doing something much bigger than I understood at the time.

They weren’t just a band with a clever song.

They were kicking down doors.

I spent quite awhile going down the YouTube rabbit hole looking for more on Fanny, and there’s a ton there. Great film/video clips from the 70s, later takes, interview, and yes, even a film trailer (above).

So fantastic to learn about what — and who — Fanny really were all about.

Who are they? Where did they come from? What kind of life have they lived up until the moment they appear on the page?

Why do they do what they do?

Each character that a writer brings to life on the page is, hopefully, represented as a realistic, living, breathing person. At least that’s how he or she should be imagined by the reader.

As a writer, it’s important that every character that shows up on the page wants or needs something. They’re motivated. It may be a big thing or a little thing. It may be important or maybe not so much. But something must move them. Unless the reader gets at least a glimpse of that motivation, they might wonder why the character is doing what they’re doing. And why.

It all comes down to that character’s backstory. What I’ve discovered is that the more a writer knows and understands their characters, the clearer their motivation for what moves them when they appear on the page.

But here’s the part that took me a while to really understand:

The reader doesn’t need to know all of it.

The writer does.

Take a character like Ellen. On the page, she might come across as overly cautious—double-checking details, hesitating before making a decision, asking one too many questions. It’s easy to read that as indecisive, maybe even a little frustrating.

But if the writer knows that Ellen grew up in a household where one bad decision unraveled everything—where financial stress and instability were part of daily life—then her behavior starts to make sense. She’s not stalling. She’s protecting against something she’s seen before.

The reader may never be told any of that directly. But they’ll feel it in how she moves through the story.

Or take Marcus. He’s the kind of character who pulls away just when things start to get serious. Leaves relationships early. Keeps people at a distance. On the surface, it might look like he’s incapable of commitment.

But maybe the writer knows something else—that Marcus once gave years of his life caring for someone, losing himself in the process, and when it was over, he made a quiet promise not to do that again. Now his distance isn’t coldness. It’s self-preservation.

Again, the reader doesn’t need the full history. But without it, the character risks feeling thin, or worse, inconsistent.

That’s really the point.

Backstory isn’t about what happened in the past—it’s about how the past shows up in the present. It shapes how quickly a character reacts. What they notice. What they avoid. What they’re willing to risk, and what they’re not. It lives in the pauses, the choices, the things left unsaid.

And it’s also where a writer has to show some restraint.

Because, I’ll admit, there’s a strong temptation to explain it all. To lay it out so the reader understands exactly why Ellen hesitates, or why Marcus walks away.

But most of the time, that’s not necessary. In fact, if the reader can clearly see the backstory laid out in front of them, there’s a good chance that too much has been said. What matters more is that the writer knows it—and lets that knowledge quietly inform everything the character does.

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The reader sees the surface.

As a fledgling novelist, I’ve discovered that slowly introducing bits and pieces of a character’s world is one of the more interesting aspects of writing. It can appear in a brief dialogue exchange. Or a short exposition to get a character from Point A to Point B. The challenge is to bring those bits into the story so subtly that by the end, you know the character pretty well, without having to have to have read through a big info-dump.

The writer builds everything. When you look at my novel, Forged in Ancient Fire, and begin to understand the main character, Jia, you slowly see how her past shapes the way she moves through the world.

She grew up somewhat sheltered. Raised by a loving, protective single mom, Sandy, Jia learned early on to trust the people closest to her. That kind of upbringing leaves a mark—it creates a sense of safety and a belief that people generally mean well.

But there’s another layer.

Even in that protected environment, Jia sensed that something wasn’t quite right. There were gaps. Things left unsaid. A feeling that parts of her life didn’t fully add up. That curiosity—quiet at first—became part of who she is.

Then her mother dies unexpectedly, leaving her adrift.

So when the opportunity comes to travel to Seoul and meet her Korean family, she accepts. On the surface, it might seem like a simple decision, even an impulsive one.

But it’s not.

It’s the result of both sides of her past working at once. She trusts easily because she was raised to do so. And she questions things, because something in her life taught her to. That combination—trust and wariness—is what drives her forward.

And when she arrives and begins to realize that some members of the Korean side of her family have their own motivations for bringing her there, her reactions aren’t random. They’re rooted in everything that came before.

That’s where backstory lives—not in long explanations, but in the choices a character makes, and how they respond when things start to unravel.

Next time you read a novel (and I hope you’re reading one now or will soon!), pay attention to how a character’s backstory shows up in bits and pieces, and how seamlessly the writer (one hopes) brings it into the main story.

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The reaction wasn’t just mixed—it was hostile.

Craig didn’t fit the established mold. He lacked the polished, dark-haired look audiences had come to expect, and the British tabloids zeroed in quickly. Before a single frame of Casino Royale had reached audiences, the narrative was already set: this wasn’t Bond.

Then came the Bahamas.

In one now-iconic scene, Craig’s Bond emerges from the ocean—lean, cut, and completely self-assured. A clear visual callback to Ursula Andress in Dr. No, but flipped. This time, Bond was the one being watched.

The image landed on the front page of a British tabloid.

Wait! There’s an outtake!

And just like that—everything changed.

The same actor the press had dismissed was suddenly… undeniable. The skepticism didn’t just fade—it reversed. The guy who “wasn’t Bond” now looked exactly like the Bond the franchise needed.

By the time Casino Royale opened, Craig didn’t have to win people over. That had already started. And once audiences saw the performance, the shift was complete: a tougher, more human Bond. Physical. Vulnerable. Dangerous in a way that felt grounded rather than glamorous.

Craig delivered—and then some.

His run would span five films:

• Casino Royale

• Quantum of Solace

• Skyfall

• Spectre

• No Time to Die

And in a franchise first, his version of Bond dies at the end of No Time to Die—a bold break from tradition.

Which raises an interesting question.

Did that one image—the one that flipped the narrative—also set the tone for everything that followed?

Craig’s Bond was never untouchable. From the beginning, he felt different. Not just cooler or tougher—but more human. More exposed. A Bond who could bleed. A Bond who could love. A Bond who, ultimately, could die.

But before any of that could land, the audience had to accept him.

And that’s what the photo did.

Before it, Craig wasn’t being welcomed—he was being written off. The press had already decided what he wasn’t. The photo didn’t argue the point.

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It erased it.

Same actor. Same film. Same role.

Different story.

The skepticism didn’t just soften—it evaporated. The guy who “wasn’t Bond” suddenly looked exactly like Bond—or at least, a version people didn’t realize they were ready for.

Not the old template.

Something new.

And that shift—more than the photo itself—was the turning point. The image didn’t create Daniel Craig’s Bond.

It made people see him.

Not the beginning of his Bond, but the moment the world changed its mind.

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Saturday night, my buddy Corky took me to see his favorite guitar picker, an Aussie named Tommy Emmanuel. A young player named Jack Schneider opened, and a packed house at the Elsinore Theater in Salem got an acoustic guitar masterclass.

Sunday night, it was the Koonce-Ross-Fraser Band at Mississippi Studios in Portland—Jon Koonce (Johnny and the Distractions), Marv Ross (Quarterflash), and longtime Portland guitarist Doug Fraser.

Two nights. Two rooms. Great music all around.

But something unexpected followed me home.

Late in Tommy Emmanuel’s set, he brought Jack back out for a couple of songs. One of them was “Garden Party,” the 1972 hit by Rick Nelson.

And just like that, I had the song stuck in my head all weekend.

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The night that sparked the song

“Garden Party” isn’t just catchy—it’s autobiographical.

It traces back to October 15, 1971, when Nelson played a Rock ’n Roll Spectacular at Madison Square Garden, sharing the bill with legends like Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and Bobby Rydell.

The audience came expecting the clean-cut teen idol they remembered.

That’s not who walked onstage.

Nelson had changed—long hair, bell-bottoms, a different sound. He opened with his old hit “Hello Mary Lou,” but then pivoted into Country Honk, the Stones’ stripped-down country take on “Honky Tonk Women.”

That’s when things turned.

There was booing.

Some accounts say it wasn’t about him—that security was breaking up a fight in the back of the arena. But Nelson heard it, felt it, and took it personally. After one more song, he left the stage.

That moment—whether misunderstood or not—became the seed for “Garden Party.”

A song full of ghosts (and friends)

What makes “Garden Party” so compelling is how Nelson processes the night. Instead of a straight retelling, he turns it into a kind of musical collage—full of references, inside jokes, and quiet commentary.

When he sings “people came from miles around,” it echoes Story of Bo Diddley—a subtle nod to one of the artists sharing the bill.

Then come the more playful name-checks: Yoko Ono, and her “walrus”—a wink toward John Lennon and I Am the Walrus.

It gets more insider from there.

“Mr. Hughes” is George Harrison, who sometimes traveled under that alias. “Dylan’s shoes” points to Bob Dylan—and even a rumored (but never completed) project of covering his songs.

Nelson folds himself into it, too—referencing his own Hello Mary Lou alongside Dylan’s She Belongs to Me.

Then comes the turning point.

“A song about a honky-tonk” circles back to Country Honk—the moment the crowd turned cold. “It was time to leave” is about as plainspoken as songwriting gets.

But the song doesn’t stay there.

It pivots.

“Out stepped Johnny B. Goode” brings us back to Berry, via Johnny B. Goode, with its immortal line about playing guitar “like a-ringing a bell.”

And then Nelson lands the whole thing with a nod to Elvis Presley—the ultimate survivor—recalling the old advice that he’d be better off driving a truck than trying to make it in music.

What it really meant

Nelson had been in the public eye since he was eight, on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. By 17, he was a bona fide rock star, eventually landing 54 songs on the charts—including “Poor Little Fool,” the first #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100.

By 1971, though, he was something else: an artist trying to evolve.

“Garden Party” is his response to that moment of friction—between who he was, who the audience wanted him to be, and who he was becoming.

It’s funny. It’s a little bitter. But mostly, it’s honest.

And maybe that’s why it still sticks.

Coda

Rick Nelson died in a plane crash on December 31, 1985. He was 45.

But “Garden Party” remains one of those rare songs that tells the truth about the business, the audience, and the artist, all at once.

And all these years later, it still sneaks up on you… maybe at a concert, late in the set… and stays in your head all weekend long.

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The more I wrote, the better I got. That felt certain.

But…

The more I learned, the more I realized I wasn’t as good as I thought I was—or wanted to be. Not by a long shot.

Which, it turns out, was a good thing.

About seven years ago, after running out of excuses, I started taking fiction seriously. I wanted to write a novel. A good one—or at least one that made sense. Something with a main character, a plot, a story. All the things I assumed a novel should have: character development, pacing, vivid scenes, action.

Maybe even a point.

I knew it would take time. But you write a novel done unless you start.

The first draft introduced Jia Peach—an Irish-Korean woman in her mid-20s, living in the modern world… and also a sorceress. That mix of the familiar and the impossible—what we call urban fantasy—was immediately compelling to me.

The draft itself?

A wild, wonderful mess.

Which is exactly what it should be.

A first draft isn’t for the reader—it’s for the writer. It’s where you discover the story. You chase ideas, stumble into moments that surprise you, and start to understand what you’re actually trying to say.

I loved the process. Loved the character. So I kept going.

A second novel. Then a third. Then a fourth.

I revised the first two. The others are still waiting for their turn.

Somewhere around the fifth, I had an epiphany:

I didn’t really know Jia.

Not as well as I thought.

How could that be? She’s my main character. I’d lived with her in my brain for quite a while.

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But it was true. I didn’t fully understand her, or the world she lived in—especially the magic. I hadn’t defined its rules, its limits, or its cost. And without those boundaries, the story didn’t have the structure it needed.

So I went back to the beginning.

I read. I studied. I paid attention to how other writers handled power—how they limited it, shaped it, made it meaningful. Because if magic can do anything, it ends up meaning nothing.

Slowly, I rebuilt the foundation.

Who Jia is.
Where her power comes from.
What it costs her.
Who’s hunting her—and why.

And just as important: her family, her history, the forces closing in around her.

In late 2023, I started over.

With her origin story. I figured if I could write a tale about how she became who she is, it would make the following stories much easier to write.

This time, Jia wasn’t 26.

She was on the verge of turning sixteen. That shift changed everything. The story tightened. The emotional stakes sharpened. But it still wasn’t ready—not even close.

I worked with a plot development coach and two editors to shape it into something that actually worked.

It’s been one of the most intense—and rewarding—creative experiences of my life.

Because along the way, I had to confront something else:

I overwrite.

Left to my own devices, I’ll spend three paragraphs describing wallpaper. Or furniture. Or what someone is wearing, and why it matters. I love those details. To me, they help define the world.

But too much of that?

It slows everything down.

So I learned to cut.

To let scenes breathe.
To trust the reader.
To give just enough detail—and no more.

Last summer, I started publishing Forged in Ancient Fire on Substack.

And yes—I knew it was long.

So why put it out there anyway?

Because I wanted to understand how serializing novels worked on the platform.
Because I wanted to see how the story felt once it was public.
Because I wanted feedback.
And because I knew I’d learn something.

I did.

At over 150,000 words, the book was too long. Bloated in places. Sluggish where it needed to move.

Not quite the story I wanted to tell.

So, over the past several weeks, while preparing the final chapters for Substack, I started cutting.

Hard.

From 150K down to around 90K.

About 40%.

And I don’t think it lost a thing.

If anything, it finally does what I always wanted it to do:

It moves.

Here’s an example.

Before:

Rorschach barked again, and Jia wondered if her grandmother heard it or if the imaginary dog’s warning was only for her ears. Still, the bark was a profoundly familiar warning: rough and stern, not necessarily because the danger was nearby but because something important was about to happen—something she should know about.

As she passed her grandmother, lying down and snoring softly in the living room, she entered the kitchen, and a light tap-tap-tap came from the front door. No way it was Zilly. Who else could it be?

Jia opened the door a few inches and was surprised to see an older, elegantly dressed woman, obviously Asian. Chinese, perhaps. Or Japanese. No. The woman was Korean, and oddly, she looked familiar to Jia. The woman reminded Jia of her father.

“Yes? Can I help you?” Jia peered around the door.

“Excuse me,” the old woman said with a soft smile. “I’m looking for — you, I think — if you’re Jia Park.”

“Uh, yeah,” puzzled. “That’s me. Why?”

“This may come as a big surprise, but I’m your great Aunt Baem. I just arrived from Korea. I’ve come a long way to see you,” she said, and glanced back at a car at the curb, nodding briefly.

“My great Aunt? I’m sorry—who—? Here to see me? I don’t understand.”

“If you invite me in, I’ll tell you what it’s all about,” she said, her smile broadening.

Jia wasn’t sure what to think. She had no idea she had a Great-Aunt, but the woman looked harmless, and Jia’s curiosity was up. She thought of her mother, who would often invite strangers or students into the house to help them out.

“Uh, yeah, I guess so. Come in,” Jia shrugged and opened the door. She turned and yelled down the hall, “Grandma! We have company! Wake up!”

After:

Rorschach barked.

An alert.

Did her grandmother hear? Or was it for Jia’s ears only?

She checked the living room to see her grandmother snoring softly. As she entered the kitchen, a light tap-tap-tap came from the front door.

No way it was Zilly. Not now.

Who else could it be?

Jia opened the door a few inches and saw an older, elegantly dressed Asian woman on the porch.

Chinese. Or Japanese.

No—Korean.

And somehow familiar.

She reminded Jia of her father.

“Yes? Can I help you?”

“Excuse me,” the old woman said with a soft smile. “I’m looking for—you—if you’re Jia Park.”

“Uh, yeah,” Jia said, puzzled. “That’s me. Why?”

“This may come as a surprise, but I’m your great Aunt. I just arrived from Korea. To see you,” she said.

“My great Aunt? I’m sorry—who—to see me? I don’t understand. What for?”

“If you invite me in, I’ll tell you everything,” she said.

Great aunt? News to Jia, but the woman looked harmless.

Something about the woman didn’t sit right.

But she was curious.

“Uh, yeah. Come in,” Jia shrugged and opened the door.

She turned and yelled down the hall, “Grandma! We have company! Wake up!”

Same scene. Same intent.

But now it moves.

The story breathes. It doesn’t get buried under the weight of its own description.

And that’s the version I’m preparing for print.

To be certain, there’s nothing wrong with either way of describing a scene, and these two versions are straightforward examples of the editing I’m doing.

Editing is often seen as the drudgery part of writing a novel. While writing a first draft, you’re seeing the story unfold, letting the words flow, and plastering them onto paper or a screen.

Once you know the story and the plot and the character (to a degree), you now fuss over every word, every sentence, every bit of dialogue. You’re trying to ensure the story is told properly without going beyond what it needs. You focus on flow, pacing, character development, and more.

I enjoy it.

I really do.

Yeah, weird, right?

Consider this line from the segment above:

Something about the woman didn’t sit right.

It goes by in an instant, but it plants a small seed and gives the scene just a hint of microtension. Later, when something else comes up about the woman, a reader will instinctively understand they were forewarned. They may not remember exactly when or how, but it’s there.

In the earlier draft, Jia is curious about this woman who claims to be her great-aunt, but it doesn’t go much beyond that. In the revised, shorter, better-flowing scene, a brief moment of curiosity is subtly highlighted.

To me, that’s the great fun and challenge of writing. It’s why I’m still learning and enjoying it so much.

I’m currently working with a designer on the cover and interior, and it’s starting to feel real in a whole new way.

So yeah—

It’s cool.

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We’d all heard of The Robert Cray Band. Even though they worked the West Coast from Tacoma on down, we claimed them as our own. And we all knew the story: the band had inspired Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi to form the Blues Brothers. More specifically, it was Curtis Salgado—fronting the Crayhawks, with Robert Cray on guitar—who caught Belushi’s attention while he was in Eugene filming Animal House.

Paul Shaffer even introduced the Blues Brothers on Saturday Night Live in 1978 by saying they were formed “with the help of Curt Salgado and the Cray Band,” and their first album, Briefcase Full of Blues, was dedicated to Salgado.

At least, that’s how the story goes.

Salgado’s path started earlier, leading The Nighthawks in Eugene before joining forces with Cray. He sang and played harmonica in The Robert Cray Band for several years, including on Cray’s debut album in 1980. By 1982, they’d gone their separate ways—or so I thought.

But one night—1984, I’m pretty sure—a couple of buddies and I headed down to Key Largo. I brought my camera and shot a roll or two of black-and-white film, just to see what I could get. I didn’t have much experience shooting live music, and what experience I had didn’t always match what I hoped for. Still, that’s how you learn.

Robert Cray and Curtis Salgado at Key Largo, Portland — likely 1984

Key Largo had opened around 1979 at 31 NW First Avenue, just a half-block from the Burnside Bridge. I saw a lot of bands there. I even played there a few times myself with a couple of groups. And—fun fact—I once danced with Rindy Ross of Quarterflash not long after Harden My Heart hit big.

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But back to Robert and Curtis.

Memory is a funny thing. I’ve got these shots labeled 1984, and that feels right—but I wouldn’t swear to it. I might have even brought the camera because we’d heard Curtis was sitting in that night. Or maybe that’s something I’ve added later. Either way, the moment stuck.

I’d always believed they only played together for a couple of years. A little digging proved otherwise—they shared the stage for the better part of six. Both went on to long, successful careers, and both are still going strong today, now in their early seventies.

And somehow, one of those rolls of film managed to hold onto a piece of it.

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