I write books about
other people's engines.

I grew up on a farm outside Woodstock, New York, in a house with eight kids, a lot of snow, and a rotating cast of cars in various states of disrepair. My father was a musician. My brothers had the barn. I had whatever was up on blocks that week.

One winter we tied our sleds to my brother Fred's Cutlass in the middle of the night, figuring we'd get towed down the mile-long driveway before anyone woke up. Fred put the car in a ditch. When he pulled the rope out of the snow, the sleds came up one after another like soldiers falling into line, and then our mailbox came up last and saluted us with the flag in the upright position.

That's the kind of story I mean. Every family that's ever owned a car has one.

Then I spent twenty years making other people loud

I ran live sound. Two decades of arenas, festivals, load-ins at four in the morning, and standing behind a console listening for the exact moment a room tips over. It taught me more about timing than any writing class ever could — where a beat lands, how long to hold a silence, when to bring the thing home.

In 2000 I came off the road. I started an electrical contracting business so I could sleep in my own bed and raise my three daughters, and that's what I did for the next couple of decades. Wire, conduit, panel boxes, and three girls who are now considerably smarter than me.

I never stopped writing

Notebooks, laptops, the backs of invoices. Mostly a science-fiction series I'd been building for years about what happens to a soul when it ends up in an engine block instead of a person. That's Motor Gods, and it's still coming.

But somewhere in there I realized the thing I actually love writing isn't spaceships. It's the guy who rebuilt the carburetor twice — once because it needed it, once to do it right. It's the grandmother who bought the Corvette at seventy-eight because she finally did the math. Those people are everywhere, and almost nobody writes them down.

So now I do. One at a time, for one owner at a time, from photos and stories their family sends me. It's the best work I've ever had.