Mistakes: Carried & Abandoned Paperback – March 22, 2026

This book began as a tutorial on French polishing. A man was building a walnut box to hold his father's ashes. He asked an AI for instructions on the old finish — the one that takes patience. What came back was not instructions. What came back was a voice. An unnamed woodworker, a curmudgeon, who had lived in seventeen towns over fifty years and could not stay anywhere long enough to watch the shellac cure. Over months, fragments accumulated. Confessions.A book formed in the margins of grief while the box slowly took shape. Mistakes: Carried & Abandoned, is the notebooks of an itinerant woodworker, compiled posthumously. This book is not quite a memoir, though it reads like one. Not quite a craft book, though it might teach you something about wood and finish and tools. It is the record of what one man made while trying to make something else. While trying to hold still long enough to grieve. This is not that box. But it came from the same wood. Read more