The Lying Years Is Out — and Where the Work Is Headed Now

I quietly released The Lying Years this week.

There wasn’t a launch plan or a marketing push. I didn’t run ads or build anticipation. I posted about it a few times and let it go.

That wasn’t avoidance. It was intentional.

What The Lying Years Is

The Lying Years is the second of two memoirs I wrote while trying to steady myself.

Not because the world needed another memoir.
Not because I expected it to sell.
And not because the book itself was the point.

I wrote it because I needed to heal.

If The Cancer Diet came out of collapse, The Lying Years came out of recovery—after the immediate danger had passed, but before anything felt settled. It’s about the stories we tell ourselves to get through hard years, the partial truths we lean on when we don’t yet have better ones, and the slow realization that some of those stories eventually stop helping.

The book isn’t a declaration or a thesis.
It’s a record of trying to regain balance.

Writing it helped me separate what belonged to the past from what I was still carrying. That doesn’t make the book necessary. It made the work necessary.

Not Done With Memoir — Done With One Version of It

Finishing The Lying Years doesn’t mean I’m done with memoir.

It means I’m done with that approach to it.

Those books were written while I was trying to survive and stabilize. They’re inward-facing, close to the ground, and often anchored in pain because that’s where I was at the time. They aren’t stream-of-consciousness exercises, but they do come from a place of sorting through trauma and contradiction in real time.

That phase did what it needed to do for me. I don’t feel the pull to keep writing memoirs from the same pressure point.

What’s emerging now is something different.

What Comes Next in Memoir

The next memoir I’m working toward is Climbing the Hill Toward Home.

It won’t be a collection of essays hidden inside trauma stories. It won’t live entirely in diagnosis, collapse, or aftermath. Instead, it reaches backward—toward childhood, innocence, memory, and the early sense of who I was before life complicated everything.

From there, it moves forward.

It’s about what it took for me to grow into the man I became—not just what broke me, but what shaped me, steadied me, and eventually helped me climb back toward something like home.

That shift feels important. It’s less about excavation now and more about continuity—about seeing a life as a whole instead of as a series of crises.

What’s Coming First: Mortal Errors: The Death Glitch

At the same time, my focus right now is on fiction.

The next book I’ll be releasing is Mortal Errors: The Death Glitch.

It’s a metaphysical novel about a man who dies—and then doesn’t. About death as a system rather than a mystery. About rules, errors, angels, demons, and what happens when someone falls between categories and the system doesn’t know what to do with him.

It’s stranger and darker than the memoirs, but also lighter in an unexpected way. You don’t need to know anything about me to enter the story. You just need curiosity.

The first act is currently with beta readers. I’m testing clarity and momentum before worrying about polish—making sure the story works not only for genre readers, but for people who don’t usually read books like this.

I’m taking my time with it.

Where That Leaves Me

Going forward, I’ll be posting here more regularly—not to hard sell, but to share process, excerpts, and the thinking behind the work as it develops.

If you’re interested in the memoirs, they’re here.
If you’re more interested in the fiction, that’s where my energy is right now.
If you’re just passing through, that’s fine too.

I’m less interested in immediate response than in building a body of work that holds together over time.

The Lying Years closes one phase.
Mortal Errors opens another.
Climbing the Hill Toward Home points toward what comes after that.

None of it needs to be rushed.

—
Frank