We published The Colored Kid, our first fiction title since Trail to Telluride back in 2020. The Colored Kid is superficially a thriller but thematically a little stroll down Racial Tension Way. Find it at Amazon, Apple, and Barnes & Noble.
1/1/25
Works in Progress Update
Far Hills, NJ
2024 was a banner year for Simpson Books
Back in January we published the Third Edition of Middle Class American White Boy. Available in Hardcover, Softcover, E-editions, and for the first time the entire collection can be found on Audible as an Audio Book narrated by the Author.
iHeart Radio picked up Wham Bam Stories by Simpson and changed the name to The Ten Minute Storyteller. New Stories drop every Thursday morning. The ongoing collection of short short stories can now be heard here.
The documentary Wooden Boats of the St. Lawrence, written and narrated by Thomas William Simpson is available on Amazon Prime and can be viewed here.
And finally in 2024 Simpson adapted Robert Wells’ excellent aviation novel, Staggerwing, into a fantastic screenplay. The script is presently making the rounds at various production houses in New York and Hollywood.
2025 looks to be another banner year
(…so long as we can stay healthy and mostly out of trouble.)
The novel Guy and Jo: A Hollywood Love Story will be published this spring. Guy and Jo is a murder mystery with a contemporary love story at its core.
Also in line for publication in 2025 is Who Says Bogey Ain’t Par?, a light, amusing, and informative guide to the grand old game of golf. My good buddy Buckley, a golf junkie, is co-authoring. If he can get off the links and finish his end of the affair we should see the book in print in time for Father’s Day.
Additional publishing plans for 2025 are as yet incomplete but work continues on several existing manuscripts and one brand-new idea just beginning to germinate.
Significant progress has been made on Elizabeth’s War, the first volume of Simpson’s American trilogy, though the last volume to be written. Elizabeth’s War covers the years from approximately 1774-1830. Annie’s War (published in 2011) covers the years from 1830-1920. And Mary’s War covers the years from 1920-2020. Mary’s War is largely finished but awaits one last peruse by the author. Tentative publication is sometime in 2026 or 2027.
The first 50,000 words of Sixth Son: Journeyman Storyteller, have been completed. This is slowly developing into a memoir, but knowing Simpson it might veer off into fiction at any time. No plans yet for publication.
This past April, while vacationing on the Outer Banks, Simpson began scribbling down a story idea that popped into his head during one rainy, windy day. By the end of that day he had written almost five thousand words. The Man Who Had Six Wives now runs to over 60,000 words and is patiently awaiting Simpson’s return.
The story idea just germinating concerns a middle class kid from suburbia who is suddenly cast a modern day Messiah through the magic of social media. We’ll see where it goes. Maybe nowhere. But maybe somewhere entertaining as we swirl blindfolded into a future awash with Artificial Intelligence, Misinformation, & Don Trump.
And finally we have the manuscripts that are essentially complete but thus far remain unpublished due to the eccentricities of an author who refuses to let go. These include Mary’s War, Guy and Jo: A Hollywood Love Story, The Capricious Rhythms of Love, and Summer of Love: A Day in the Life of Henry Goodfellow, Poet.
These novels have gone through countless drafts. But for reasons not entirely clear it’s tough for Simpson to sign off and toss them into the publishing maelstrom. You might say he’s holding on for dear life. Especially A Day in the Life of Henry Goodfellow. The story of Henry and his family and his crazy in-laws and the big old beach house on Elizabeth Island and Henry’s wild take on the world and his place in it might remain on Simpson’s hard drive until his death. He takes enormous pleasure in digging into that manuscript for a couple months every year and working to make every character pop, every scene memorable, every sentence entertaining. His goal with Henry Goodfellow is to make fiction even more real than real life.
Simpson, after all, sees himself as that very lucky man whose work and play are one and the same thang.