The Work
The Sit Boy: Chapter 8 - The Last Day of June
June 19, 2026
A new chapter of The Sit Boy is live, and it’s a big one: Chapter 8, “The Last Day of June,” closes out Act 1.
This is the chapter where Dixon finishes the thing he started: the unmaking of his old life. He comes home to Atlanta to a house that won’t let him go cleanly, and he spends his last days there doing the small, sweaty, unglamorous work of ending a life in a place: mowing a feral lawn one final time, giving a freezer full of food to a stranger named Dale who arrives in eleven minutes flat, puzzling over his father’s broken clock, and painting himself out of the garage one stroke at a time. He gets a six-day houseguest in Bagley, a hundred-pound Bernedoodle who loves him completely and then forgets him the instant his real owner comes home, which is its own kind of lesson, the second one like it in a month. And then it’s the first of July, and he turns the car west toward nothing in particular, which has somehow become the only direction left.
The chapter ends at the exact moment the title track of my album Somewhere West of Me is singing about: the man in the driveway, the white picket fence, the pull toward a life he hasn’t lived yet. The song has been embedded right where the chapter lands, so you arrive at the music at the precise instant the story has been driving toward all along. After eight chapters of build, hearing it land in its proper place is something I’m really proud of.
One scheduling note: The Sit Boy is going to take at least a week off before Act 2 begins. I’ve got a couple of other projects I want to get out into the world first, including the debut of something new I’ve been quietly building. Here’s the only hint I’ll give for now: it’s fiction, but it’s nothing like The Sit Boy. Different genre entirely. The Sit Boy explores a different kind of West, and this new series will explore a different kind of North. More on that very soon.
Act 2 of The Sit Boy will pick up when the pause is over. Dixon’s got a full tank, a guitar he can’t play yet, and a whole country with no particular destination in it. There’s a lot of road left and a whole lot of dogs are on the way.
The Sit Boy is a multimedia novel — fiction, music, and images — told across the American West. Read it, hear it, and see it at slightlymoody.com.
Find me on Instagram at @slightly_moody_creative.