paint dries as a train goes off the rails

The cover for the book. The title is 'Paint Dries as a Train Goes Off the Rails. The author is Nicholas Marchuk. The cover depicts a train derailment and pileup in a mixed media collage.'
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When a freight train crashes into Connor’s neighborhood, the ensuing fire leaves him homeless. He shares a cramped hotel room with his restless yet magnetic coworker, Kara. Thrown together as they rebuild, it's easy for them to fall for each other.

When their cherished neighborhood is set to be demolished and replaced with a park, she leads Connor and his friends on a last-ditch act of defiance: a concert at the site of the accident, featuring the musicians who lost their homes, to prove their community is worth saving.

As friendships, relationships, and lives are strained, he confronts a simple question: What if giving all of something isn’t enough?

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The cover for the anthology. The title is 'Lineman: An Anthology. The author is Nicholas Marchuk. The cover depicts power lines at sunset.

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Lineman takes you across the galaxy: From a miner on the planet Venus, to a society that puts baseball above all else, to a man who thinks he may have dissolved the corpse of his landlord in a barrel, this collection is sure to keep readers guessing.

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What is the correct amount of Venice?

October 16, 2025

Venice has a problem: everyone wants to visit. The islands making up the city are frequented by 60,000 visitors a day on average, with up to 120,000 visitors a day on peak. Given the relative small size of the island, this has posed obvious quality of life issues for residents, including but not limited to gentrification. Venice residents have responded in kind: in the last 50 years, the population of just the main island of Venice has dropped from 175,000 permanent residents to 50,000. What is to be done?

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The book is here!

August 23, 2025

So, I'm no longer just a guy: I'm an author! No longer am I just someone who, if you saw him on the street, would be spat on or kicked or called names. No more am I a little bug you might crush under your shoe. I am something completely different and cooler: an artist, a cosmopolitan man of literary tastes, and most importantly *interesting*. I have written a book and you can read it, today, and I sincerely hope you do. All you have to do is click one of the big blue buttons:

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I'll try anything once

August 09, 2025

We are officially less than two weeks out from release! Barring any disasters, the book will come out on August 22nd, 2025. The first chapter of this book was written on March 21st, 2023. I have not, in reality, been writing it for 2.5 years, but from concept to publication, that's how long it took. The next one will come much faster. Now, for what I've been doing:

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Cover reveal!

July 08, 2025

The book cover is here! I'm excited to share it with you, and even more excited to see it printed.

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Everything is data

June 09, 2025

This blog post is inspired by something I recently wrote to Sidney Gish. I said in my email, "I think your music has genuinely taught me something about people and helped me understand others better..." and I think that sounds like praise, which it is, but it's something that is genuinely true when it comes to my writing.

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Words that I think are silly

March 29, 2025

You need to have at least two blog posts on your website, or else it's not a blog, it's just a page. So, I'm adding this here while we wait for me to start blogging for real. The book is coming along; I'm almost done with my personal round of revisions. Soon I'll be sending it to be edited and read by a couple people for feedback. The cover is coming in a few weeks as well.

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Introduction

February 25, 2025

Hey! Welcome to my website. This blog is where I'll be posting updates related to books I'm writing, music that I like, ideas that I had, and other long-form content. Blogging is something about that the internet seems to not be able to shake, no matter how much we try. At one point, we used to even do something called 'microblogging'. Remember that?

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