This list is bound to grow, and may in fact be incomplete already, but these are many of the songs that influenced and inspired the writing of DIXIANA. Like most of my fiction, songs are key: the narrative of the DIXIANA saga is on one level meant to mirror and echo the history of ‘hillbilly music,’ […]
Writing update: I’ve been mum about this work lately, but progress on my epic literary novel DIXIANA goes quietly and diligently onward. Since the first draft back in August, what was already a formidable text has now grown to the Wolfeian length of 315,000 words, with still quite a few small chapters, scenes, and moments […]
So as part of my research for DIXIANA, a novel that’s steeped in both a literal and allegorical history of American ‘hillbilly’ music, I wanted to know about the time as a nine year-old that I attended the Grand Ole Opry. We’d gone to Nashville to have Thanksgiving with the Texas branch of the family, […]
Here’s a rundown on my various unpublished manuscripts. — DIXIANA—From May 1 to August 21, ‘Novel 2013’ consumed my life, mind, and soul; since then, I’ve kinda-sorta been in creative recovery, and for good reason: with this sprawling first draft now ‘in the can,’ as they say in the moviemaking world, DIXIANA represents the culmination […]
DIXIANA . . . a novel of Edgewater County, of word counts and pages, scenes and characters, voices and plotlines. Since May 1, when I began writing the first draft, this enormous piece of fiction has been the top project for me, the exclusive project, in fact. And coming up on the second full week of […]
The news dropped today that my long-in-gestation literary novel MANSION OF HIGH GHOSTS, now out on submission, has made it through the initial reading at Pat Conroy’s new fiction imprint Story River Press, though not selected for the first round of releases coming in 2014. When is a rejection not a rejection? When you’ve made the […]
Seven hundred pages; one-hundred eighty six thousand words. DIXIANA rolls on. As we enter the last week of the third month of writing this massive Southern literary novel (and with my personal deadline looming in another month’s time), over the last few days I’ve suffered something of a crisis of confidence. Not so much over […]
DIXIANA, otherwise known around these parts as Novel 2013, is still chugging along, and now stands at 166,000 words; hitting 170 today or tomorrow. What’s next? Three major ‘books’ within the overall structure of eight sub-books and an epilogue (already done and in place) remain to be written. What this means, I think, is that […]
The day and night of July 2, 1995 at the Deer Creek Music Center outside Indianapolis might have been eighteen years ago, but as with any intense experience, the memories of what a dedicated Deadhead expereiloom large and fresh and terrible. ‘Suffer’ is a matter of degree, I know. But to have your final Grateful […]
It’s getting into that holiday-week feeling vibe, and with the end of month number two of the composition of DIXIANA upon us, time for an update regarding what we may also think of as Novel 2013. Click through to find out more about what this project’s all about, my approach to the writing, and my ambitions for […]
