The premise of my debut novel, The Great Birthright, is that a Los Angeles developer wants to privatize Oregon's publicly owned beaches, and only one washed-up detective and self-published writer can stop him. That writer would be me, writing about myself in the third person just like Norman Mailer and Caesar!

I've been writing about the sacrosanct great notion of Oregon's publicly owned beaches for years, but wanted to take a new run at the subject and have a little fun with it by sending up the detective genre with all sorts of twists, feints, digressions, primary sources, and blasts of metafiction. I also wrote the book to promote the upcoming 50th anniversary of Oregon's famous 1967 Beach Bill, one of the most important pieces of legislation in the state's history. Actually, "promote" is the wrong word; it doesn't go nearly far enough. In reality, I am massing a great Oregon army to celebrate the Beach Bill. The army is leaderless as far as a single individual goes. The leader is the people of Oregon. Anyone who has ever enjoyed one minute on the state's publicly owned beaches is a soldier in the army. That means dogs, too.

Read more at http://www.powells.com/book/great-birthright-an-oregon-novel-9780990677512