As some reading this may know, in 2008 I published the small, strange, children’s fantasy-in-verse, Zorgamazoo. It’s the story of Katrina Katrell, an adventure-obsessed girl, who teams up with a sports-obsessed zorgle named Morty, and a band of other eccentric creatures, to save the world from an equally eccentric alien invasion.
Obviously.
At the end of the book, the narrator promises more adventures and, at long last, I have one. It just took a while. Between work, life, and other writing projects, I didn’t complete the manuscript that became Zorgamazoo‘s sequel until the end of the pandemic. Indeed, it turned out to be my “lockdown novel“.
Unfortunately, in the aftermath of COVID-19, economic pressure saw Zorgamazoo‘s publisher, Razorbill Books, cease operations as it merged with Putnam. This left me with a rather large sequel manuscript but no publisher. It was a discouraging prospect – until I remembered the underlying ideas and intriguing research that inspired Zorgamazoo in the first place (more on that research is here).
The bottom line is this: Because all my verse novels are meant to be read aloud, a shared reading experience, I’ve decided to put out A Rhyme in Time as a podcast novel, free to listen to by anyone, anywhere, anytime.
I intend this project to be distinct from an audiobook. Instead, I might call A Rhyme in Time an “acoustic novel”; it’s not merely fiction read aloud, but rather a novel whose form inherently flows into this medium.
Over the next few months (I’m writing this in Feb 2026), I’ll try to release a new chapter each week. If there’s a child somewhere in your life, I hope you’ll point them in the story’s direction, and I hope you’ll listen along too.
Finally, perhaps most importantly, I hope at least some of those listening grow up to be lifelong readers of fiction. We need as many as we can get.
🚀🚀🚀
Sample the preface to A Rhyme in Time here:
Listen or subscribe to the rest on Apple Podcasts and Spotify:
