I’ve got a fun guest blog post up over at The Fantasy Book Critic, a great site for reviews of the latest excellent fantasies, thrillers, sci fi, and other reads. The post is linked here. It’s got everything (well, mostly guitars and some debate about traditional versus indie publishing). Bit of a teaser below to suck you in.

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Back in high school, I fell for guitars in a big way. My dad taught me the four chords to Runaround Sue, which I later realized was the full extent of his own expertise, on an old nylon string acoustic we had lying around. That might have been it, me pounding away on a pretty crappy guitar for a week or two before getting bored, but my older brother had also caught the bug at some point. He had gone as far as purchasing a barely-touched Yamaha electric. It was a Stratocaster ripoff. It was black. It looked vastly cooler on me when I finally figured out how to strap it on. A few tentative trips from my bedroom to look in the bathroom mirror was all it took to make this my latest obsession.

Music had always been a love of mine, again most thanks go to the older brother who raised me on a steady diet of metal and hard and alternative rock. But in retrospect the timing of my guitar obsession probably had a lot to do with my fading basketball hopes and dreams. I’d been a grade school star who barely made the lowest tier of high school ball and quickly recognized I was done. I’d spent hours every night practicing on our driveway hoop. That energy had to go somewhere. And it did, big time. 

For the next several years…continue reading over at the FBC