It’s here! Brad’s new book, Crossing Cascadia.
Martha Beckstead just started a new job, but today will be her last day. She thinks it’s because her husband ordered her to quit and stay home with their two young daughters—their fundamentalist religion discourages women working outside the home. What neither of them knows is that today the long-feared Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake will devastate the entire west coast from Canada to California. Martha will be a hundred miles from home when the bridges fall, the roads buckle, and the mountainsides collapse in a rush of mud and stone. She’ll be alone as she survives the harrowing journey through the Oregon wilderness to discover if her family has survived the quake and the massive coastal tsunami. The trek will threaten her life, erode her belief in the god she’s always known, and transform her into someone she never expected.
We only get twenty-six little letters to choose from to build them, but their power is immense. String them together one way and you can launch a revolution. String them together another and you can destroy a marriage. Words are like actors waiting to take the stage, capable of tapping into profound emotions and changing the way we see the world. Most of the time they fight me, fumbling around on stage and accomplishing nothing. But sometimes the magic happens and they put on a performance that strikes at the heart and burrows into memory. These moments make all the brainstorming, editing, revising, cutting, and rewriting worth it.
Thank you for visiting the place where I play with words. I hope you find something useful. You might want to check out the (now discontinued) Inside Creative Writing Podcast where I explored the craft and technique of fiction and creative nonfiction in a weekly podcast, or my series of Real-Time Revision Videos where viewers could be a fly on the wall as I wrestled with these stubborn words until they did something worthwhile, or maybe you’re just curious about the kinds of things I write or want to find out just who the heck I am.