James D. McCallister

author of the Edgewater County series

MTC Fall Writing Classes Return

This stuffy summer finds me not only blazing through the third revision of the DIXIANA saga (1608 pages and counting) but continuing to wait for news on any number of promising submissions, the most prominent of which is my literary drama MANSION OF HIGH GHOSTS currently residing on desks and hard drives at Pat Conroy’s Story River […]

Spring MTC Classes: Signups are Open!

After a successful and stimulating Basics of Screenwriting course this fall, I’m energized to teach again during the winter and spring terms in the Midlands Technical College continuing ed program. The Fiction Writing course returns first, and then immediately after, we go back into scriptwriting mode.

UPDATED: DOGS OF PARSONS HOLLOW Screenplay Progress

UPDATED 2/27/13 11:20am EST All right! The first draft of DOGS OF PARSONS HOLLOW, the screenplay, is in the can. Thank goodness. At 131 pages I feel that it’s too long, but a revision will sort out problems of pacing and length. In any case, it’s a wonderful feeling to yet again realize a long-held […]

February 2013 Writing Projects Update

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 […]

FORGING AHEAD: 2012 Fiction Recap and New Year’s Goals

With a number of awards and advancement opportunities coming my way, 2012 landed for this humble independent writer as a creative and professional benchmark: As a now-agented author with a new small press novel in print and another extremely commercial MS resting on publisher’s row hard drives, the possibility is strong that I’ll soon land a […]

Going Down Screenplay Way

With all the work I have in the can and also on a low simmer, I’ve decided to ‘knock off’ a quick screenplay adaption of my novel MS, DOGS OF PARSONS HOLLOW. The damn thing was designed to have that sort of cinematic appeal, so why not? If not me, who? If not now, when? […]