Journal — G.B. Hill

What's in a Story, and Why I Write

September 21, 2026 · 1 min read

A story is a way of holding onto something that would otherwise slip away. A dream. A memory.

A moment of pain that finally made sense once I put words to it. I have always believed experience and imagination are not opposites. Both are trying to tell you the truth about something, just through different doors.

I write because I have lived through things I could not say out loud until I wrote them down first. There is something sacred in that process, like God meets me in the quiet of putting pen to page, and helps me make sense of what I could not carry alone.

Somewhere between the page and the reader, those private moments become something shared, and that part still surprises me every time. A story I write from my own life might become the exact words someone else needed to feel less alone.

That is what a story really is to me. Proof that you survived something, offered in faith to someone who is still in the middle of surviving it themselves.

So when I write, I am not just recording what happened. I am trying to turn it into something worth reading, honest enough to sit with, and hopeful enough to carry forward. Dreams and experience, side by side.

Both true. Both worth telling.

Stories Leave Marks

September 13, 2026 · 1 min read

I've been staring at drafts, mockups, half‑finished sentences for months, and now readgbhill.com is up, and it's just... there. Real. Public. A little terrifying, honestly.

The tagline came easy: stories that remind us hope can survive almost anything. But building a site around it? That took longer. I wanted the first thing you see to feel less like a landing page and more like a front porch; somewhere you could sit for a second before deciding whether to come inside.

That image on the home page, a guy with his back to you, somewhere between a South Side street and an Arizona sunset, wasn't an accident. That's the whole book, honestly. That's the whole me. Chicago raised me; Arizona rebuilt me.

The baseball glove and the guitar on the ground next to him aren't props; they're the things I actually reach for when the words won't come. Different places, same dream, stronger stories. I keep coming back to that line because it's the truest thing I know about my own life.

I thought about making the site polished and safe, something that looked like every other author page. But polish isn't really what this project has ever been about. Loss leaves marks. Pain leaves marks. So does healing, if you let it. I wanted the site to hold all of that without flinching, not therapy‑speak, not inspirational‑poster gloss, just honest.

So here it is. Explore the stories if you want the books. Listen to the podcast if you want my voice instead of my sentences. Either way, welcome. You're not reading this from nowhere.

Neither am I

Two Books, Two Reasons

September 4, 2026 · 3 min read

I have two books coming into the world soon, and people keep asking me which one matters more. That is the wrong question. They were written for different rooms in the same house.

Kings of Concrete Field started as a memory I could not put down. Englewood in the summer of 1980 is not a place you find on a map anymore, not the way it was. It was heat and concrete and a group of boys who had almost nothing except each other and a baseball diamond that did not care what neighborhood you came from once you stepped on it. Gil Barnes is fourteen in that story, and so was I once, standing on a mound that felt bigger than my whole future.

I wrote this book because that summer taught me something about carrying weight that I did not understand until I was old enough to look back and name it. Boys are not given much room to be afraid out loud. Baseball gave us a place to be afraid quietly, together, and to find out what we were made of without ever having to say the word resilience. I never wanted to write a nostalgia piece. I wanted to write the truth of what it costs a kid to keep showing up.

Bound to the Light comes from a different room entirely. It is shorter, quieter, and it asks a harder question than the ball field ever did. What do you do when the dark does not lift on schedule? I did not write this novella to hand anyone a lesson. I wrote it because I needed to sit with a character who was still looking for the light even when he had every reason to stop looking. There is no ceremony in that kind of endurance. There is only the next morning, and the one after it, and whatever small thing keeps a person turning toward daylight instead of away from it.

People sometimes assume a writer picks one theme and stays in it. I do not work that way. Grief and boyhood and baseball and the long walk back toward hope all come from the same well in me. I do not separate them so much as I let each story take the shape it needs. Kings of the Concrete Field is loud in places, full of crowd noise and rivalry and the particular joy of a summer that does not know yet it is ending. Bound to the Light is closer to a held breath. Both are true to something I lived through, even when the details on the page are not my own.

I am not going to tell you these books will fix anything for you. That is not what I set out to do. What I can tell you is that I wrote them the only way I know how, by staying honest even when honest was the harder sentence to write. If either book meets you somewhere you needed to be met, I will consider the work done right.

Both are on their way. I will share exact dates as soon as I have them locked down. Until then, thank you for reading this far, and for being the kind of reader who wants to know why a book was written and not just what happens in it.

If you want to hear it first, join the mailing list. I will let you know the moment both books are live.

The Cliché Nobody Wants to Hear

August 9, 2026 · 1 min read

People love to tell you time heals all wounds. I used to hate that line. It felt like something you say when you don't know what else to say, a placeholder for comfort instead of the real thing. But I've come around on it a little, not because it's fully true, but because it's incomplete in a useful way. Time doesn't heal anything by itself. Time just gives you more chances to choose what you do with the wound. Some people use that time to bury it deeper. Some people use it to finally look at it straight on.

I've spent a lot of this year in editing mode, right now working through revisions on Kings of Concrete Field, and editing has taught me something similar to grief. You don't fix a manuscript by writing it once and walking away. You go back. You read the same page for the fifth time and notice something you missed the first four. Healing works the same way. You don't arrive at it. You keep circling back to the same memory, the same person, the same loss, and each time you're a little more equipped to hold it.

So if you're waiting to feel done with something, waiting for the wound to just quietly heal on its own schedule, maybe stop waiting. Go back to the page. Look at it again. That's where the actual work happens.

Why These Stories Exist

August 1, 2026 · 1 min read

Every book on this shelf started in the same place: a moment I didn't think I'd survive intact. Kings of Concrete Field, Bound to the Light, O Negative: Is anyone There, Rhapsody G different people, different circumstances, but the same questions underneath. What do you do with grief you can't put down? How do you hold onto faith when the ground keeps moving under you? What's left of you after the people you loved are gone, or the family you built starts to come apart?

I'm not interested in easy answers, and you won't find any here. I write toward the mess, because that's where the healing actually happens not after the pain, but through it. If you've lost something you can't get back, these stories are for you. You're not walking through it alone.

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