Fiction exploring psychology, philosophy, mystery, and the limits of truth.
Understanding is not the same as knowing.
Featured Novel
For Dr. Steven Gold, a single patient may unearth the truth behind a murder—and himself.
A Question of Balance is a cerebral and emotionally charged mystery that explores the fragile terrain of guilt, belief, and the cost of self-knowledge.
As a psychologist’s search for truth deepens, questions of meaning and identity begin to blur the boundary between patient and self. Interpretation hardens into certainty, therapy becomes entanglement, and belief—disavowed in name—returns in other forms. What emerges is not a clear answer, but a confrontation with the limits of understanding itself.
Before the questions of belief and identity that shape his later life, a young psychologist is drawn into a series of murders that may—or may not—be connected. As he searches for truth and understanding, he begins to confront a difficult reality: understanding is not the same as knowing, and some answers only deepen the mystery they were meant to resolve.
Projected completion: December 2026.
A man can no longer trust the boundary of his own mind. Memory, fear, and imagination bleed into one another, until even his thoughts may not be his own. As certainty dissolves, he is forced to confront a terrifying question: if nothing can be trusted, what remains?
Projected completion: December 2026.
I listen to a wide variety of music while writing, reading, and revising. These are a few of the playlists I return to most often—different kinds of accompaniment for different kinds of thought.
Much of my work begins as fragments—notes jotted down throughout the day and night, often without clear connection. Music helps me return to them, to sit with them long enough for patterns to emerge and for something more coherent to take shape—though not always to resolve.
It also helps quiet the background noise of life when I’m trying to concentrate. I don’t use it as background so much as a way of sustaining attention—holding a space in which ideas can be revisited, tested, and, at times, transformed.
Jazz as thought. Piano trios and modern jazz shaped by tension rather than resolution—music that moves without settling, allowing thought to deepen without distraction. For revision where meaning is uncertain, identity unstable, and answers arrive, if at all, indirectly. Post-bop / ECM / avant-garde- Space, tension, introspection.
Classical as feeling. Quiet enough to reveal what’s there, structured enough to keep the mind from drifting. It doesn’t lead, but it doesn’t disappear either—sitting just beneath language, where meaning sharpens and subtle inconsistencies begin to emerge. Neo-classical / romantic minimalism- Emotion, reflection, atmosphere
Jazz as movement. A broader, more changeable field of sound—less narrowly tuned to a single mood, but equally suited to long stretches of concentration. For work that benefits from openness, variation, and the occasional shift in tone. Hard bop / bebop - Groove, swing, propulsion.
Use this form to send a message to David Sherman.