Here’s a useful set of writing rules courtesy French author Marc Levy. After an initial stroke of luck in 1999 with his first book (Dreamworks nabbed the film rights, allowing Levy to quit his day job and write full time), he’s since had quite a bit more success—thirteen novels in print to the worldwide tune of 27 million total […]
Quick news break: Tonight I’m pleased to announce a change in representation—no, not with a new agent, but rather the same Michelle L. Johnson who has shepherded DOGS OF PARSONS HOLLOW thus far on its path to eventual publication. Michelle’s just moved under a new shingle, Inklings Literary, which is where she’ll now be repping […]
As work progresses in 2013, every month or so I’ll post an update. — DOGS OF PARSONS HOLLOW (novel) After a fast and somewhat mysterious rejection from Simon & Schuster, the MS is currently at Penguin Group, where the longer it stays the better: these things take time. I persuaded an agent, Michelle L. Johnson, who persuaded […]
So you’ve completed and revised a manuscript that’s a thriller, that’s a character study, that’s suspenseful and literary and exciting . . . an easy sell, right? Right. What if it’s set in a milieu that could be seen as distasteful or icky, however . . . like the brutal blood-sport of dogfighting?
Backstory: A number of years ago I began a YA I called VISUAL PURPLE, in which an emotionally disturbed young woman, Courtleigh, 25, pretends for a variety of reasons to be 15 again—she interacts with actual teenagers, has a love affair, and through her actions engenders tragedy, violence, and her own downfall. During a few […]
Readers of my Saturday Evening Post short story finalist ‘Trailer Trash‘ (a version of which also currently appears in Petigru Review, the journal of the SC Writer’s Workshop) have not only told me what a vivid picture I paint of my young protagonist’s ordeal in extreme housecleaning, but also in my scene-setting during the story’s […]
Backstory: I completed the first draft of last summer’s new novel, LET THE GLORY PASS AWAY, on August 21, 2012, after which it lay resting and untouched for nearly five months. With the turning of the calendar’s page and the dawning of a new year (and with 20 pages of notes and ideas at hand), […]
As this article makes so dreadfully clear, my novel DOGS OF PARSONS HOLLOW, about a woman’s crusade against the backwoods dogfighters she discovers living next door to her new country home, features a platform and basis very much rooted in reality. As the author of a novel that makes clear its moral stance when it […]
Out of my many unpublished pieces, ‘Patterns of Recognition’ (not to be confused with William Gibson’s very fine novel Pattern Recognition) is one of my personal favorites, but along the way acquired a few rejections. Very happy this morning, however, to report that it’s been accepted by online journal Fiction365, which publishes a short story […]
It’s not every day a writer gets an invite like this one: — In its nearly three centuries of existence, The Saturday Evening Post has published short fiction by a who’s who of American authors including F. Scott Fitzgerald; Dorothy Parker; William Faulkner; Agatha Christie; Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.; Ray Bradbury; Louis L’Amour; Sinclair Lewis; Jack London; Ann […]
