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 […]
Here’s an updated rundown on my various unpublished manuscripts. — MANSION OF HIGH GHOSTS—As we know from this wonderful news back in July, 2013, MoHG, as my original literary epic is known ’round these parts, is under consideration for publication from Story River Books as part of the second slate of titles from this exciting new fiction imprint at the […]
Ah, the holiday season…! It’s that time when, for a month or so, this author’s other role as a small business owner begins to take precedence over the writing career. I’m sure most working writers will find it easy to sympathize with the necessity of keeping food on the table, roof over head, et cetera—these […]
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Here’s a rundown on my various unpublished manuscripts.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 […]
A posting on the New Yorker site regarding the Twelve Tribes, a religious sect (or cult) that follows around particular musical acts, proselytizing and recruiting in the parking lot, features a quote from me regarding an encounter I had almost 25 years ago with one of its members outside a Grateful Dead concert in Landover, MD. (A […]
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 […]
