is an author of transgressive fiction. He’s spent most of his adult life doing odd jobs—light stuff—passing on gigs he considered overly ambitious. He’s a foodie who loves dogs. He tries to come off as a whiskey drinker, when in fact he always sticks to beer. 

Derek’s bipolar when it comes to his writing, loving a project for a matter of days or weeks and plowing forward as if he were producing the next great American novel. Then he’ll wake up one morning, look at his work and say, What the hell was I thinking? This is awful. 

He put his first ill-thought project away in disgust, until eventually another great idea came along, and next thing he knew, he had the next best thing again, only this time it was for real—until it wasn’t—at which time it was hidden away. This cycle went on until Derek had accumulated what he considered six or seven really bad starts to really shitty novels. 

Then one day while searching for loose change at the bottom of a drawer he stumbled upon that first one and gave it a read. He thought it wasn’t half bad, super good even, so he wrote on until what he had—in his head, anyway—was once again a disaster. It’s no wonder his debut novel, The Purple Line, took him over ten years to complete.

You can try to contact Derek at writerderekmorgan@gmail.com.