Building a World You Can Hold: The Story Behind Memories of an Ash Covered Sky

When you spend years inside a story, it stops being just a story. It becomes a place. A memory. Something you can almost touch.

While finishing Memories of an Ash Covered Sky, I found myself wanting to bring that feeling into the real world. Not just with words on a page—but something tangible, something playful.

So, somewhere between the last rounds of edits and final cover proofs, I made a Mike Walters action figure. (Not for sale. Just for fun. And maybe for a laugh.)

I also updated my business card—something simple but rough around the edges. A better fit for the kind of world this book lives in: a world shaped by fire, memory, and the long road home.

They’re small, creative side notes. The real story—the one I’ve been carrying for years—is Memories of an Ash Covered Sky itself.

A Story Burned Into the Landscape

Set against the Almeda Fire’s real-life devastation in Southern Oregon, Memories of an Ash Covered Sky digs into more than just a natural disaster.

It’s about what happens when everything you’ve built turns to ash. It’s about the wreckage we carry inside. And it’s about what it means to walk back toward the things—and the people—you once left behind.

At the heart of the novel is Payne Creek Estates, a small, overlooked community where lives intersect just as the flames come roaring in. For Kaley Lattimore, Mel Hall, and Teddy Daley, it’s the last stop before survival—or ruin.

But the true center of the story belongs to Chief Murphy Wilson and his daughter, Sky—two people who once meant everything to each other, but who now stand separated by years of silence and regret.

When the fire arrives, it forces a confrontation neither of them saw coming—and a chance at redemption neither thought they deserved.

A First Step Into Sky’s World

She wasn’t thinking about saving the planet. She was thinking about survival—hers, and hers alone.

Sky watched the driver—Steel, as he called himself—give another booming speech about fighting for the earth. She didn’t trust him. She didn’t trust men like that. Men who said the right things but crumbled when it mattered.

The van rattled off I-5 toward a town Sky hadn’t seen in years. Closer to a home she’d abandoned without a second thought—a place buried under years of grief and shame.

She wasn’t just fighting the fear of returning. She was trying to find the courage to face the one person she had hurt the most—the one person who still mattered more to her than anything else: her father.

She leaned her forehead against the window and closed her eyes.

Steel preached about saving the world.

Sky wanted nothing more than to try and save herself.

Why It Matters

Memories of an Ash Covered Sky isn’t just about a fire. It’s about the invisible burn—the slow loss, the drifting apart, the words that go unsaid until it’s almost too late.

It’s about how we come back from the wreckage. Not perfectly. Not easily. But maybe—if we’re willing—with enough strength to try again.

Coming May 9, 2025

The action figure and card were just a small way to celebrate the path here. The real weight, the real fire, the real hope—it’s all inside the novel.

Thanks for being part of it.